Distribution of Android Enterprise apps for alpha and beta testing

Steps

MaaS360 adds support for the distribution of pre-release versions of public and private channel Android Enterprise apps for internal testing purposes. The alpha and beta testing tracks allow administrators to receive early feedback from users and fix issues before releasing the app to production.

Prerequisites

• App developers must enable alpha/beta test tracks for the app in Google Play Console. App developers can add enterprises to closed alpha/beta testing, or alpha/beta testing using Google Groups. For more information, see https://developers.google.com/android/work/play/emm-api/distribute and navigate to Distribute apps for alpha/beta testing.

Distributing pre-release versions of an app in MaaS360

MaaS360 allows administrators to distribute different pre-release versions of the same app to different targets. For example, Alpha version can be distributed to the alpha testing group, Beta version to the betatesting group, and Production version to all devices.

Note: If an app developer makes the alpha version available from Google Play, the beta version is also available in MaaS360 by default. 

For new apps, the distribution tracks are available in the Policies and Distribution tab in the Add Google Play app and Add Private App for Android Enterprise workflows.

For existing apps, the distribution tracks are available in the distribute app workflows.

Note: The distribution tracks are unavailable if the app developer does not explicitly make them available to the participating organizations through Google Play Console.

View available distribution tracks

The distributions and available tracks can be viewed in the detail view of the app.

To view the distributions, hover over the distributions in the Distributions field.