Why do my alpha releases on Play Store roll out to production users?

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I'm publishing an app through Play Store. The app is developed using Expo.

Currently, the production version has internal version code of 4, version name of "1.0.3" and the app has been updated 7th of August.

I recently made some fixes to the app and then built an app bundle with internal version code of 5 and version name of "1.0.4". I published that version to closed testing via the alpha track. Now, clients with no access to the alpha track are getting the alpha version, while the product page in Play Store still shows that the app was last updated 7th of August and has version name of "1.0.3".

What is happening here? Some sort of misunderstanding on my side regarding use of version codes?

beta expo google-play testing android
1 Answers

Okay, I found out what is causing this. Seems that I didn't read expo documentation carefully enough.

I have been building the releases with command expo build:android -t app-bundle, which, as documented here, also publishes the updates as an OTA update:

Please note: When you run expo build, Expo automatically publishes your app (with expo publish). In order to avoid accidentally publishing changes to your production app, you may want to use release channels.

Since I didn't specify a release channel when building the app bundle, the updates were published to the default release channel.

user_166351960
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