770677 - test out pre-uploading of APKs to google play store

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

The last couple of Firefox Betas it has taken nearly an hour to ship Fennec because of the Google Play cache/CDN. Catlee suggested that maybe we could pre-upload the APK to the store but not activate it as a way of speeding this up. We don't know if this will actually make a difference, and there's some question about whether or not we'd have versionCode issues if we needed to activate an older version after doing so. We should test this out with a different account/app and find out.

Comment 1

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

I think this is a really good idea. We have a test app in the official account that can be used. If we can do the testing before 14.0.1, that'd be awesome. Prior to FN15 would be great too, since that's the next feature release (and one that press will really pick up on).

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Do we care about the upgrade path or just that the CDN refresh time? If the former we will need two builds signed with the same key. One to be the old build and the other to be the new upgrade build.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

All we really care about is how quickly the "last updated" time changes IMO. I don't even think there's a need to download the builds at all, we can test this by watching the test-product equivalent of https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox_beta.

Comment 4

[Lukas Blakk [:lsblakk] use ?needinfo]

We can pre-upload the apk to the store, we've done that before.  I don't see that improving the availability of update though since they likely ignore everything until activated.

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Lukas Blakk [:lsblakk] from comment #4)
> We can pre-upload the apk to the store, we've done that before.  I don't see
> that improving the availability of update though since they likely ignore
> everything until activated.

This is exactly what we're trying to find out for sure here. As well as whether or not preuploading breaks our ability to activate versions with older versionCodes.

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

We preuploaded the 15.0b1 APK to the Google Play store today. It was uploaded (but not activated) at 10am PT. We activated it around 1pm PT and it showed up on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox_beta at 2:20pm PT.

Given that, it seems pretty clear that pre-uploading doesn't help so I'm resolving this FIXED and going to cry about the fact that there seems to be nothing we can do about this huge delay =(.

Comment 7

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

Thanks for testing Ben, agreed on the crying :(