Release APKs and app store delivery

[Volker Krause]

Hi,

with the Craft-based Android release package builds hopefully being close to 
working, here are some thoughts on the next steps of getting those packages 
into the corresponding app stores/repositories, and a few points I would need 
help with.

(1) Signing
This should mostly be a copy/paste job from the existing setup for the nightly 
builds.

(2) F-Droid Release Repository
On the Jenkins side this should also be mostly a copy/paste job, the nightly 
build script for this will only need minor adjustments to be less aggressive 
for expiring old packages.

We however would need to set up a new repository for release packages, next to 
the one with the nightly builds. Ideally with a long-time stable URL so we can 
maybe convince the F-Droid people to include that by default as an external 
source (even if that means disabled by default as per their policy, still 
better than not being available at all). That's probably something that would 
need sysadmin help.

(3) Google Play
I would like to evaluate using fastlane supply (https://docs.fastlane.tools/
actions/supply/) for automatically uploading metadata and APKs to Google Play. 
That doesn't necessarily imply publishing APKs blindly, but being able to 
automatically have APKs in the staging area as well as automatically syncing 
translations for the app description seems very much worth it to me. And given 
that fastlane actually defined the metadata format that F-Droid is using I 
have high hopes that this integrates well with what we already have.

However, fastlane seems to be mainly distributed via Ruby's package manager, 
not via regular distro packages. Is that a blocker for installing this on the 
signing machine?

For testing, I'd also need an API access key for our Google Play account, as 
described in the above link. I think that's something Aleix has to set up, I 
don't have permissions for that.

This then presumably also needs a small driver script like we have for F-Droid 
to upload new packages and metadata after signing.

Makes sense?

Regards,
Volker
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