📱Android - How does your team 👉 DEV -> QA -> Release ❓

This post will outline our current process for mobile development on an Android app. Hopefully it will instigate discussion and responses on how other teams have implemented this software development lifecycle.

How our team ships Android apps (software development lifecycle):

1. Developer checks out a feature branch to do work
2. Developer pushes branch up, jenkins builds an apk with the feature branch name in the filename [feature branch name].apk
3. QA team downloads and sideloads this feature branch apk to run on their Android device
4. If QA passes, the developer merges the feature branch into master branch
5. To make an app store release, the developer checks out a release branch from master, bumps the versionCode and versionName values, builds an apk and uploads for a Play Store release

This process requires a lot of manual installing/uninstalling of Android .apk's but it is reliable for separating builds and features for testing.

Does your team have a different way for Android software development lifecycle?