Publishing apps on "expo build:...." command

Expo Development Tools
1

So i ran into a problem this week.

I have an app which is up on Apple Store and Play store, last month i had to change few things in the app so i did all i had to do and ran the command “expo publish” and the app was uploaded on both stores.

Last week i needed to change a lot of things, so i worked on it and i ran the command “expo build:android -t apk” to generate an .apk file and test on an android device that i have BUT the new version of the app was uploaded on Apple Store and Play Store though this command.

How do i build an .apk file without uploading it on Apple/Play store? I just need to change the “versionCode” and “buildNumber” on app.json file?

2

hi there! when you run expo build a new over the air update is also published, and then that is used as the basis for building the binary. this is not particularly intuitive, and so with the next generation of expo build, EAS Build, we changed that behavior. see this blog post for more information.

to work around this on expo build, you can create a new release channel for your new build. expo build:android -t apk --release-channel prod-v1.2 for example

4

build command did not upload binaries to stores, build when finished also runs “publish” into “default” channel aka OTA updates. So you received update not from stores.

To disable auto updates need to add into app.json

{
  "expo": {
    ...
    "updates": {
      "enabled": false,
      "fallbackToCacheTimeout": 0
    },
    ...
  }
}