I recently learned a lesson on the the importance of having a sensible versioning scheme in Android.
tl;dr
- Setting the version name for each Android release is important!
- If you update the
versionCode, also update theversionName.
versionCode 11
versionName "1.1"The Downlow
Android applications have two version identifiers available, versionCode and
versionName. In order for users to install a fresh release of your app, the
versionCode must be updated. This is used internally to uniquely identify
each release to the Android operating system. The versionName is simply the
user visible version string. It is easy and understandable to wish to have a
target set of features complete before setting a milestone version. However this
can cause problems further down the line.
Unfortunately the versionCode is not included in the crash report
information via the Play Developer Console. Which can make it very
hard to know which version someone was using when they encountered a problem.
Luckily the versionName is included in the crash data allowing identification
of the release, if it was updated
A Release process?
My suggestion is to ensure that the versionName is updated whenever the
versionCode is updated. Perhaps this can be automated with a gradle script?