"Superseded by production" prevents testing of Alpha release of Android Xamarin app when version code appears to be higher than production

Question

I recently uploaded an Alpha release of an application to the Google Play site. The android:versionCode in the AndroidManifest.xml was 94. (I can't actually see that number in the Release management section of the play.google.com website - it only seems to show the Version Name there - but I know that was what was in AndroidManifest.xml when I built it, and the Version Name shown is the correct value that corresponds to that versionCode.)

The version code for our Production track shows on play.google.com as 92. So it does not seem like that should supersede the alpha release with version code of 94.

FYI, I did do one thing that we don't usually do - I uploaded version code 93 directly to beta, but did not roll it out. Once I encountered this issue, I discarded the 93 beta, but that didn't help - the alpha still says it is Superseded by production.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

My response on another ticket might help others here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/68809424/16531573

I ended up using the "promote release" option on a closed testing apk in order to start open testing.