Download generated APKs using the Play Developer Publishing API

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• Download all APKs generated by Google Play from your app bundle using the Generated APKs feature in the Google Play Developer API.

• A typical workflow involves uploading a bundle, assigning it to a track as a draft, downloading generated APKs, processing them, and then promoting the draft to a staged or full rollout.

• To use generated APKs with bundletool, create a directory containing a toc.json file with TargetingInfo from the API response and downloaded APKs named using their DownloadId.

You can download all APKs that Google Play generated from an app bundle you've uploaded to Play Console using the Generated APKs feature in the Google Play Developer API.

How to use generated APKs

A typical publishing workflow which includes downloading generated APKs before they are released on any track would be the following:

1. Create a new edit, by calling Edits: Insert and specifying the app you want to modify.
2. Upload a bundle by calling Edits.bundles: upload.
3. Assign the bundle to a track by calling Edits.tracks: update. To avoid releasing the new version to end users at this stage, set the status of the new release to draft.
4. Commit the edit.
5. Download the APKs generated from the bundle that you uploaded in step 2 using the Generated APKs methods in the API.
6. Process your downloaded APKs.
7. Create a new edit as you did in step 1.
8. Promote the draft release to a staged or full rollout by calling Edits.tracks: update.
9. Commit the edit.

Tip: Alternatively, if you want to avoid committing a draft release, you can release a new version of the app to an internal test track before downloading the generated APKs.

How to construct your APK directory

If you need to use your APK files with bundletool, follow these steps to build them using the Generated APKs API:

1. When calling the Generated APKs list method, the response will contain TargetingInfo field for each signing key. Write this field value to a file named toc.json.
2. Download your APKs, and put them in a directory with the toc.json created in the previous step. Note that each downloaded APK must be named "DownloadId.apk", where DownloadId is the ID used to download the APK from the Generated APKs download method.
3. You can now use this directory with bundletool version 1.15.2 or higher. For example, bundletool install-apks --apks /path/to/created/directory.