How to Increment Minor Versions on Google Play Store and Apple App Store

The other day we released a new app version and posted it to our internal testers on our Facebook Beta Tester Group. 

To our dismay, we launched version 1.3 and realized that as we told our users to download the app- it was not showing the latest version. 

What happened?

Apple is a tad bit slower than Google, so we really were freaking out about nothing. It hadn’t finished going through the review yet. So, that was fine when we uploaded version 1.3. 

On Android: 

In a late-night Slack chat with Max Cornell from our awesome dev firm, Grio, we were able to figure out the root cause of the issue. There is a symptom of our automated build process which does not increment Android minor build numbers the same way as iOS.

In sum, iOS 1.3 is the same as Android 1.0.4194789. 

When we uploaded the APK (Android Package Kit), we were unable to edit the release number manually, and it still showed Version 1.0, even though we’re effectively at 1.3. 

The way to fix this is to make sure that the Android Version Name in the APK manifest file is properly linked to the minor version increment that you’re trying to upload. You can find detailed information from Google here

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="https://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.example.myapp"
    android:versionCode="1"
    android:versionName="1.0" >
    ...
</manifest>

I hope this explains what went wrong and how to fix it in the future (for anyone else looking to update Android minor updates).