Publishing / upgrading multiple team members

Question

As a team we developed and published an app in Google play. This is done by signing with a personal generated certificate. Now we want to upgrade the app, but we are bumping into the issue that we need the original (personal) certificate for it to work.

Different members (other than the member that originally published the app) must be able to upgrade the app. Right now the only solution I can think of is to share the generated private key with the team members. Is there another way to accomplish this? Signing keys should be kept private right?

Answer 1

Everyone who needs the ability to upload an apk to the market will need a copy of the release key.

If privacy/security is a concern among your development team then I suggest you create some system whereby developers can submit apk's to a "leader" of some sort who can approve it for upload to the market (by signing it with the release key).

But if you wish for all of the developers to be able to compile and upload an apk to the market, then all of them must have the release key so that they can sign the apk when exporting it.