How to Publish Private Apps (without
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needing access to the Google Play
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Console)
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This feature ONLY works for devices enrolled on FocusMDM in DO mode.
It's only useful if you have a private app which is not available on the Play Store (not released) and you want to silently distribute itNOTE: This is not for private Apps hosted by your organization. Its for private Apps hosted by Google
Why use this feature?
Usually the IT administrators have permissions to access the Google Play Console as its a tool for developers. If you want you FocusMDM admin users (who are not technical) to be able to publish and distribute a new App or a new version of an App to your devices, then this is an essential feature for your organization.
FocusMDM uses the Google Play Custom App Publishing API so programmatically assists you to publish private apps to the managed Google Play store directly from your the FocusMDM dashboard.
Advantages
- Permanently private apps go through a streamlined verification process—published apps appear in the managed Google Play Store in as little as five minutes, compared to over two hours via the Play Console.
- The only store listing details required to publish an app are its title and default listing language.
Step 1 - Delegate your development publishing rights to FocusMDM
Before you can deploy publish private apps to your using FocusMDM managed devices, you need to delegate publishing rights to the FocusMDM platform.
This can ONLY be done by a technical person (who completed android for work setup, has the developer account details of your Google Play Console and the gmail account that was used for the android for work setup). Note this cannot be a company Google account.
The detailed steps to set this up are explained on the Settings→Enterprise screen
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NOTE: Only once this is correctly setup, will the Focus FocusMDM Dashboard administrator user see an action button named "Publish" in private apps list screen
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- You can't publish two apps with the same name and/or package identifier.
- Maximum .apk file size on the Play Store is 100MB.
Step 3 -
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Once you have uploaded the apk file into FocusMDM and Published them, it is now available to be included in a Rule to be silently installed/updated on your devices
After Publishing your app, you can create a DO mode Rule "Install/update work apps" and find the Private App to be the app to install silently on your devices. Reminder that this will only work for devices in DO mode
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