Ability to retain old versions of the apk

marin-marsic commented 3 years ago

This is actually a question. I was wondering whether it is possible to somehow retain some apk versions when making a new release. If so, how, if not, is there a possibility for this feature to be added?

The Google Play Console supports this option. The use cases where this would be useful are:

if some devices stop being supported and stop getting new updates, we still want to let them download the last version which was supported on those devices (eg. we stop supporting updates for devices on api levels lower than 21, but we still want them to be able to install the apk)
if we want to support different versions of the same apk for different types of devices (eg. phone, tv, wear) but release updates for one type of devices more often and don't want to release three new versions of the app every time we want to update one of them.

Also, another way of solving this problem would be to make a draft release and then manually select the versions to retain on the Play Console. So maybe this would be another argument for adding the "draft" option.

boswelja commented 2 years ago

I'm under the impression keeping old AAB/APK is the default behaviour, but I can totally see this being something we can control

boswelja commented 1 year ago

Linking Edits tracks documentation for anyone interested in working on this: https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/api-ref/rest/v3/edits.tracks

r0adkll / upload-google-play

Ability to retain old versions of the apk #76