Get APK updates that are not yet in stores

[wodin]

Hi

I’ve moved your post to the “How To” category

It’s not necessary to rebuild the APK and for your client to reinstall it. When you make changes to the JavaScript you can run expo publish to bundle that and upload it to Expo’s servers. By default your app will check for updates when it restarts (but your client will need to make sure the app is closed and not just in the background for this to happen.) Then the next time the app is started it will load the new JS bundle. So closing the app, opening it again and doing that again should get the updates.

There is also an Updates module that you can use to check for updates and restart in your code.

The following is how I do it in one of my apps. I gave the app to someone who installed it manually on his phone and I can publish updates. The only times I’d need him to install a new APK is if I upgrade to a later SDK or make changes to app.json:

Updates.checkForUpdateAsync never returns

I’m not sure what is going wrong in your case. It could be that the app is having problems connecting to the server to check for, or download the updates. In case it helps, I’ve included below how I do it. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do it, but I do it like this: I keep track of the last time the app checked for an update in a tick variable. Then every time the user changes to a different screen I check if enough time has passed since the last check. If so, I set the tick variable…

See also:

https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/workflow/configuration/#updates