Your app shows your live website. Most updates therefore happen by themselves: you change your site and people see the change the next time they open the app. A new build is only needed when the native part of the app changes.
What updates on its own
- Text, images, pages and layouts of your website
- Your site's code, including calls to
window.saastostore - Your prices, your database and your sign-in
- Everything else your site does in a browser
What needs a new build
- A plugin you turned on or off
- Tabs, header, side menu and colors of the native shell
- The app's icon, name or launch screen
- Selectors of hidden website elements
- A new address for your website, or extra domains
A new build reaches people only after you publish it and the store accepts it. Until then they keep the previous version, which still shows your live website.
Publish an update
Change what you need
Open the project, adjust the Configuration tab and save.
Launch a new build
In the Build tab, launch the same build type as your published app. The version number goes up by itself, and the same signing key is reused.
Publish it
Send it from the Publish tab, or upload the file by hand.
How many builds you have
SHIP includes 4 builds per platform for 12 months: the first one and 3 updates. Thirty days before the end of those 12 months, we email you. KEEP ALIVE then keeps one app up to date for 15 € a month or 129 € a year, with 10 builds a month for that app. You'll find it in the Maintenance section of the project page.
Take over an app already on Google Play
If your app was first published with another tool, Google needs two things before it accepts a SaasToStore build. The Build and Publish tabs have a section called My app is already on Google Play for both.
Register the upload key
Download the certificate (
.pem) from that section, then send it to Google with Request upload key reset in the Play Console. Google tells you when the new key is valid: it isn't immediate. Your users aren't affected, as Google keeps signing the installed app with the same app signing key.Set the version code
Enter the highest version code your app has already received. Your next build starts right after it. Check the number first: once a build has used a version code, the following ones can only go up.
Keep the same package name as the published app. If Google refuses a build anyway, see Troubleshooting.