Google PlayStore Hotfixing a previous Release, while in staged rollout

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We plan an unusual deployment sequence of an App into the Google Playstore.

Setup: We did rollout a Version V1.0 and afterwards a V2.0 to all customers into US and UK. We did a breaking change in the backends in US. And did a staged rollout of V2.5 into US. V2.5 does not work in UK, but we are on it to have it soon. Now we have an incident in UK, requiring an Hotfix release V2.0.1 there.

Goal: UK Customers do get a V2.0.1. while US Customers keep their V2.5 version.

We tried:

  • Rolling out 2.0.1 in UK only. This disabled V2.5 for US and US customers received V1.0 (because V2.0.1 is only rollout in UK, and V2.5 was overridden by V2.0.1)

Next idea:

  1. Rolling out V2.0.1 to UK and US for every customer
  2. Wait for approval by Google PlayStore
  3. Immediately after approval, rollout V2.5 for US again

Question: Will above idea work? Technically the rollout is setup in the store. And this is the way any hotfix, will work, right? But practically does every UK customer get the V2.0.1, while the staged V2.5 US only rollout runs too. The other risk is, that the approval of the V2.5 US rollout can take some days.

google-play-console google-play android
1 Answers

We could contact a Google Consultant. After some weeks of back and forth, we got confirmation from a Google technical team about it. And they confirmed, that we can do our plan as described in the question. It will work.

We can do a full rollout to all countries, afterwards a staged rollout to selected countries affecting 100% of those users, and later we can add the missing countries, and the rollout becomes full release.

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