Publish Private Apps

Owned by Lisa Basel
Last updated: Oct 24, 2022 by Tshiamo Shole (Unlicensed)
2 min read

How to Publish Private Apps (without needing access to the Google Play Console)

NOTE: This is not for private Apps hosted by your organization. Its for private Apps hosted on the managed Google Play Store. The managed Play Store is a more controlled version of the "consumer" Play Store where an organization can restrict only employees to see the Apps to install.

Why use this feature?

Usually the IT administrators have permissions to access the company Google Play Console as its a complex tool for developers. If you want you FocusMDM admin users (who are not technical) to be able to publish and distribute private Apps to your devices, then this is an essential feature for your organization.

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 is a description.

Step 1 - Delegate organizations managed Google Play Store publishing rights to FocusMDM

Before you can publish private apps using FocusMDM, you need to delegate publishing rights to the FocusMDM platform. 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.

For details visit this article for the steps to setup your FocusMDM workspace.

NOTE: Only once this is correctly setup, will the FocusMDM Dashboard administrator user see an action button named "Publish" in private apps list screen

Step 2 - Upload your private Apps into FocusMDM

Upload the apk files.

NOTE

  • 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 - Publish the private App to Google Play Store

Then select the "Publish" action for the file. It takes some time for app to be ready for distribution (about 5 minutes).

Reminder: The administrator user will only see an action button named "Publish" in private apps list screen if the Publishing rights have been delegated