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I have this app released on play store that I want to make available on my website. I tried downloading the signed apk via the Google play console and use that, but some users in China have issues installing it.
They get a message like this while installing: "Your device does not support Google Play Services and cannot install "
I have a few Google sdk bits referenced in my project (signin, safetyNet, ads) which I would assume I need to delete before building for this apk version, since target devices don’t have gms..
What about signing? Can I simply build without the said code and distribute it? (Generate release apk in android studio) Or do I need to upload to play console and download the one signed from google?
Please let me know if you have any clues on this, been banging my head around for a few days already.
Cheers 🙂
2
Answers
This might help you taking your decision:
If you have Play App Signing enabled, the APK generated through your studio and the APK generated through Play Console will have different signatures.
Otherwise, both approaches will have the same signatures.
So, it depends whether you care about your APK on website having the same signature as Play Store. If you don’t care about having same signature, you can go ahead with creating APK from Android Studio itself and publish to your website.
If your app utilizes Google Play Services, as is informed by the error message, then it WILL not run on the device unless Google Play Services and everything that it depends on is installed on the device. The only work around is to convert your app features that uses Google Play Services to its alternative that’s supported in China.
I’ve dealt with similar issue on Huawei smartphones, my approach was to ‘develop another app’ using Huawei SDK, check out https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/ for its complete reference