Android app upgrade without market

Question

I am going to have a alpha release of my app, which is not yet on the market. I want to have the app APK link sent out to friends via email so they can download it from my site CDN.

One question here: if I want to give them updates, what will be a good way? Can I download the new APK within the app, and somehow install the APK to replace the old one without anything to do with the market? So my friends can have the app upgraded while it is still in alpha release?

Answer 1

When I did it, I used Zubhium -- they were a web service with a small API that you could install into your app, giving you a mini "app store"-style backend and handling distribution for you. It would host and distribute your APK, connect up to their server when the app launched, check for updates, invalidate old versions, gather crash logs for you, etc. It was very good.

Zubhium are now https://www.vessel.io -- I presume they still have the above features as part of their now-much-bigger service, but when I checked you had to give them a credit card number even to sign up for the free plan, so I've not played with it.

A friend of mine uses http://testflightapp.com for iOS, and it looks like they have an Android version now, so that's certainly worth checking out. A quick search also shows up http://applover.me. @Janusz recommends http://hockeyapp.net/features in his comment.

As @Nanne points out in his answer, the Play Store itself now lets you distribute to limited alpha- and beta-test groups. That looks like it has fairly minimal features compared to the third-party services (no A/B testing, etc.), but will be familiar and free. And it doesn't need an extra SDK rolled into your app.

So, my general answer is that there's more than one professional beta-testing API/service that you could use, that they're generally very useful, quite easy to roll into your app, solve all the problems you're anticipating and more, and often have a free plan to get started. I'd recommend picking one of them rather than trying to roll your own solution.

Answer 2

If you want this only to be able to release your app in Alpha, and maybe later in beta, take a look at the android market again.

Check out this link: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/3131213?hl=en

It boils down to the fact that you can have an Alpha-test, and a beta test, each with selected users. You can upload your app as normal, so you'll have updates via the market, but not everyone can download your app.

For the beta at least, you can select a community that is the source of your users, so all that are in that community could be testers.

This is the best method for testing I believe.