659082 - automate android marketplace apk submission

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Release Engineering :: Release Automation: Other, defect, P3)

Description

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

Currently the Android market requires someone to log in via gmail, navigate a web form to upload the apk/images/form text information, and hit 'save' to save a draft.

There are a number of obstacles to automating this. Among them:

* I don't believe there's an api other than the web form.
* We may not have the correct images and text to put in all the fields. If there are required fields not populated, the web form will not allow you to save a draft.
* I don't believe there is any guarantee of the web form not changing without warning.
* If we accidentally hit 'publish' instead of 'save', the apk and draft text/images will be pushed live.  This may update our users to a broken build, and may require a respin even if the mistake is caught before anyone updates.

I think we may be able to mitigate some of the above by creating a dummy product and uploading a new dummy apk to that marketplace product at least weekly.

We also want to scrape the marketplace web pages for metrics in an automated fashion, but that probably belongs in a separate bug.

Comment 1

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

per irc w/aki, this doesnt block android becoming tier1, this just makes our release automation more... automated.

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Bulk move of bugs to Release Automation component.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Mass move of bugs to Release Automation component.

Comment 4

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

There's still no API, so there's no way for us to implement this. Until there is, there's no point in having this bug...