Release APKs and app store delivery

[Aleix Pol]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 10:17 AM Volker Krause <vkrause at kde.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

The apks we generate now are already signed and can be just uploaded
to F-Droid repos (our nightly repo being proof) and Google Play as is.
So it's already done, unless you want to deviate from it in any way,
but now it should work.

Regarding the usage of fastlane, we already support their format so
yay. I don't know though how much we can extrapolate our generation
through appstream. We might need ad-hoc solutions in some cases.

In any case, big thumbs up, would be happy to help if there's anything
I can help with.

Cheers!
Aleix