Unpublish and app in Google Play for non beta testers only

Question

I already have an app published in Google Play, and now I would like to unpublish it for anyone but a set of known beta testers. My problem is that if I unpublish it, it seems it also gets unpublished for beta testers (since the beta testers feature needs a published app).

What could I do? In other words, what I want to do is:

1. Unpublish the app so nobody new can install or find it using Google Play.
2. Upload a new version using the beta testing feature so several known people can test it
3. In the future, publish the app to everyone again.

Weatherboarding

Sir any solution? I am in the same pit hole with the only difference of using the alpha or internal testing feature instead of beta. – Shaduf

Contact Google. – Streeto

Still no solution for this, sadly... Please, make the community a favour and help me downvoting the first answer. As you have experienced, it doesn't work at all (besides, he is answering the obvious procedure we all already know and totally ignored my detailed problem). For some reason there are people upvoting that without even understanding the problem, leading others to misunderstandings. – Weatherboarding

is your application connect to a server? manage version by your server is good practice, answer by brandon is best approach, for me i always manage version by server, apps always check for update, if version used by user not maintained apps will direct to update page and direct to google play – Margherita

Beta testing: have you done open beta testing for beta release – Vivianne

Iqbal Rizky, thanks for your answer, but what you are talking about has nothing to do with the missing feature we want Google Play to have. On the other hand, Brandon's answer is a nonsense, it doesn't work at all. If you publish and unpublish an app, the whole alpha/beta testing system stops working. – Weatherboarding

Amjad Khan, thanks for your answer, but it doesn't matter what type of testing you try to have: open/private alpha/beta, as soon as you publish the app, you lose the ability to have it published for testers only forever. – Weatherboarding

@Weatherboarding Well the only close solution/trick I have found is to publish an apk with some non-existing required feature in AndroidManifest.xml and then your app will not be listed in the playstore for normal users. But still no real solution :( – Shaduf

@MuhammadMuzammil, yep, it's a pity (BTW, that's a clever one anyway!) – Weatherboarding

Bounty is going to end in few minutes and still not a valid solution :( sad – Shaduf

Yes, indeed. But if Google doesn't allow it, there is no possible solution from the community. – Weatherboarding

Answer 1

There is a dirty way to do it

Publish the app (via AdvancedSettings/AppAvailability)

Go to the Production track and select only one country (one that you know users will not use)

In your closed testing or other testing tracks select all the countries.

Foretaste

Answer 2

Under the APK tab select Switch to Advanced Mode Then deactivate the APK in production.

Switch over to the BETA TESTING tab and upload a new APK for the beta

After the APK has been uploaded select Manage list of testers... and add the Google+ community.

When you are ready to go back to production just simply click the Promote to Prod button

Junior

Thanks for answering, but maybe you don't understand my problem. I've done all that, but if I don't publish the app, beta testers can't download the beta APK. Google Play needs the app to be published even for the beta testers, it's a platform requirement, not mine. At first, for a new app, before publishing any official APK to everyone, this is not a problem, since the only published APK is the beta one. But in my case I did publish an official APK in the past, and now I don't want it to be published, but only the beta one :-( – Weatherboarding

I also tried to remove all the official APKs (on the first tab), trying to emulate the initial configuration, but it is not allowed. It seems that once you publish an official APK, you can't revert to the initial beta testing-only state :-( – Weatherboarding

I am trying to do the same thing. I want to PREVENT users from seeing my app in Production, and CONTINUE allowing users to see my app in Beta. I can't seem to remove the active APK from Production only. This is so stupid and frustrating. – Vitek

What does he say is deactivate all apk's in production and upload new apk to beta and select it activated for beta. This should work – Menthol

I know what he says, and what you say, and thank you very much for your answers, but none of you both haven't tried it because it definitely doesn't work. In fact, I don't understand the upvote in a non working aswer. – Weatherboarding

Answer 3

I don't think what you are asking is completely possible for Google-Play Store Platform till now.

But one of your point: 1) Unpublish the app so nobody new can install or find it using Google Play, is answered on Google Support.

Google Documentation - Unpublish an app

When you unpublish an app, existing users can still use your app and receive app updates. Your app won’t be available for new users to find and download on Google Play.

Your 2nd point is Tricky. Until and unless you have something in Production.

One workaround can be: Re-Publish the app, it won't take much longer if it has been published before and communicate/share the link with your testers, and then unpublish your app from the store, but this has to be done probably with-in 24 hours.

I haven't tried it, but I'm saying 24 hours since it is the minimal/fast indexing time if your app has a greater audience before, if this isn't the case you can take 2-3 days time.

Commonage

Thanks for the effort, but the whole point of the problem is that we want to revert everything to the initial state of having a published app for beta-testers only. There are not 3 problems to be resolved, there are 3 steps to reproduce the only problem, so it has no sense to answer saying how to unpublish an app. That workaround, apart from weak (you want to force users to download the app in a very short and unknown period of time), it will probably don't work, since the app needs to be published AND indexed for that. Everyone, beta-testers AND strangers will get to the app or not. – Weatherboarding