This can be a scary time, especially if you currently have an app on the store getting good reviews. One mistake in the upload process can send you home crying, or more accurately frantically back to the keyboard, trying to figure out what the problem is. Now of course you have tested your app on every conceivable device in every possible condition that it might encounter in the wild. Wait…what? You haven’t? Yea, that’s what I thought. Here are some of the worst things that I can think of happening. Not that they are the worst things, but they are the worst things that happened to me.
Early on in my app building career, I didn’t realize that you can and should test both the Debug and Release builds of your application (Android Studio makes this much easier by the way – another great reason to switch if you haven’t already). I know, a thousand apologies, I didn’t know much when I started out. Well anyway I tested the Debug version, and everything looked great. So I uploaded it to Google Play. Everything looked good. I uploaded it to Amazon and went to bed. I got up, made breakfast, took a shower and made the trek to work. On the shuttle between my parking garage and work, I read an email from Amazon telling me that my app had failed their tests and would not be launched (by the way Amazon actually tests each release before putting it up, something that Google does not do). The reason: the app crashes upon loading. Now you can imagine my panic and how difficult it was to focus on work all day. At the end of the day I rushed home to figure out what the problem was. Now, you can’t roll back to a previous version on the store (oh if you could!). So my only option was to figure out the problem and upload a new version as soon as possible. Luckily I figured out relatively quickly that the problem was with Proguard and was able to fix it pretty quickly (if you have a Debug version that works flawlessly and a Release build that crashes from the getgo, dollars to donuts that Proguard is your problem). By the time I released the new build I had had a day of one person updating the app, having it crash and immediately uninstalling it after another. I don’t blame them, that’s what I would do.
A simple tweak or upgrade to your UI can also have sneaky little consequences, sometimes only on a particular type of device (this is what really makes Android development a bear). Once I snazzed up the UI on one of my apps by adding some simple background beyond the default theme. Turns out that on some devices the code that I used causes the entire background of the view to be black regardless of the color specified. Luckily, some saint online had figured this out, and I was able to solve the issue quickly. But not before a 1-star review and who knows how many frustrated would-be users who quietly downloaded the app.
Bottom Line: Don’t take launching an update on the store lightly. Subject every release build that is to be uploaded to the same level of rigorous testing, regardless of how trivial you think the update to be.
Getting Started With Android 