We also had a dedicated DevOps team to maintain it. It’s very flexible and we used it (in combination with Rundeck) successfully to build and deploy a microservice backend to an AWS hosted Docker/Kubernetes environment. Fastlane isn’t the tool for that unless it’s combined with other tools which leads us to… One of my requirements was to start the build process upon merge.It’s possible to create new keys every time an employee with access to the keys leaves the company (provided upload keys are used to sign the app) but it’s certainly not an ideal process. As few people as possible should have access to those keys. Signing and deploying requires the signing/upload key and also the Google Play API key.Having multiple build machines also impacts the reproducibility of the build, differences in the Fastlane dependencies (Ruby libs) can result in different results. Fastlane’s documentation isn’t great imo and especially the setup on Linux is not straight-forward (time consuming). With multiple developers or if you use multiple computers to develop, you need to setup and maintain it multiple times. Fastlane needs to be installed on each build machine.For teams there are some major issues though: It’s probably good enough if you’re the only developer on the team. It’s convenient to type fastlane build_deploy and have the app built, signed and published to Google Play automatically. Why wait to bundle a big release when features can be pushed out to the customer by a simple pr/merge? In general the development cycle is sped up, not just when it comes to bug fixes but also feature releases. Automation doesn’t just save time, it also makes the process more reliable, less error-prone (to human error) and encourages to deploy/publish more often. I thought the time automation saves won’t compensate for the effort to set up a working pipeline. It’s not hard or time-consuming to create a signed APK or Bundle in Android Studio, upload it to Google Play and promote it through the different testing tracks up to production. There are many ways to build, test, deploy and publish an Android app. It’s using the latest version of AGP (Android Gradle Plugin): 7.0.0-beta01. If you use Kotlin build files (), check out my sample project.

All gradle files in this article are written in Groovy.

Gradlew build apk