Release APKs and app store delivery

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 8:17 PM Volker Krause <vkrause at kde.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>

Hi Volker,


>
> 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.
>

I can confirm that these should be just copy-paste yes.


>
> 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.
>

Adding a release repository shouldn't be too much trouble - the Android
F-Droid repository is quite light in size (compared to say Flatpak...) so
this isn't an issue at all.

The existing nightly repository has a stable URL from my understanding at
https://cdn.kde.org/android/fdroid/ so we could add another one alongside
it at https://cdn.kde.org/android/release/


>
> (3) Google Play
> I would like to evaluate using fastlane supply (
> https://docs.fastlane.tools/
> actions/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?
>

It should be fine - although hopefully the developers of Fastlane are
reasonable when it comes to how they make use of Ruby (I have been burned
far too many times by that language).


> 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


Cheers,
Ben
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