Replacing Orphaned Google Play Builds.

Google Play can be a little unforgiving regarding how it handles and flags older builds that remain active within your account. For example, your Production Track may have your latest version that fully complies with Google's updated requirements. However, Google can still flag your app for de-listing due to an old beta test build from a year ago sitting in the Closed Testing Track that you forgot even existed.

This article will go over how to find older active builds in your Google Play account, and how to replace them to clean up your Google Play Console account and keep Google happy.

Identify old build locations

The App Bundle Explorer tab inside the Google Play Console gives you and overview of every build you've submitted to Google Play.

For this task, we're looking for an older build still considered in an "Active" release status. Looking down the list in the screenshot we can see that our build from May 2022 is still marked Active and needs investigating. Clicking the Blue arrow to the right of the build will show more information.

Inside the builds details tab, we can see that this build is still active on the "Closed Testing" Track.

Note: If you have multiple older builds still active you'll need to check each of them and make note of each track that's still active.

Generating a new build

Inside of MyAppPresser, head to the App Customizer and in the Build and Preview section we need to ensure we we have a new version number set that's higher than the highest version currently in Google Play. With that set we can run a new "Submit to Google Play" Build:

When the build completes you'll receive an email notification and you should be able to access the latest build file from your MyAppPresser Dashboard page by clicking "Click to get Latest Build"

Submitting to Google Play

In this example, our old build is in the Closed Testing track so we need to start there. If you have old builds active in multiple tracks, you need to start at the lowest track in the hierarchy. This allows you to push the build through each of the following tracks, overwriting any old builds in its path.

Assuming you don't have any custom tracks set up the default hierarchy is as follows:

• Internal Testing
• Closed Testing
• Open Testing
• Production

In the track in question click the "Create New Release" button in the top right and upload your .aab file

You can add release notes if you wish but otherwise click Next and follow the prompts to release the release. From there you should see an option to "Promote Release" which allows us to move this release to another track. Using the hierarchy above, promote the release to the next track that requires clearing and follow the prompts to release.

Once all the tracks you need to clear have been cleared you can promote the release to production to also clear this build out from the testing tracks which prevents this build from causing the same issue as the other old builds in the future.

You can check everything has been done correctly by going back to the "App Bundle Explorer" page and seeing if the old build is now marked as Inactive:

Congratulations, you've now cleared out all your old builds from the Google Play console!

If you've gotten stuck at some point in this process and need assistance please let us know. Please also invite [email protected] to your Google Play account so that we can check it.