This is also some kind of background information for anyone out there who wants to publish his/her project to the Google Play Store or Amazon Appstore.
BACKGROUND: Since autumn 2024 Google has changed its “Quality management” policy for app developers. This means now that you need 12 testers who test your app for 14 days. This sounds as awkward as it is. Simply because at no point it is said for how long or how many times these 12 people have to test the app.
Worst case can be that your app will need 14 days more before going online.
My idea now was to simply upload the app to the Amazon Appstore to avoid this hurdle. This is my first time doing to, and so far i am impressed as it is way easier than the workflow with Google.
PROBLEM NOW: the hurdle i have now, is that at the point where i can select the devices i want to target, at the “Android Devices” (other the the Amazon Fire models), i can not select anyone as they all have the minSDKversion of 24 but most of them are way below this value.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION: the minSDKversion is a value that you set in a so called manifest file. In short it is something that tells Google “If you want to install this app, your Android device needs to be at least version X of the Android OS system”.
This way you can avoid using features that 5 or 10 years ago where not available on Android, thus by installing on older devices your app or game will simply not work.
SOLUTION: Currently you can only set a minSDKversion by building the gDevelop project manually. This means that you have to install several software packages to build the apk or aab file locally but that process for newbies can be a PITA.
Once that it is set up and you know what to enter in the windows or linux console, then all is easy. The way to get there is hard.
That is why i love gDevelop so much as the APK gamefile building process is super easy and quick.
CURRENT SITUATION: in a few minutes i will simply ignore the Amazon information regarding the targeted devices and then will see if it works or not.
I will keep you updated in this thread about how it worked out.