I had an app on Google Play that went live but when the 1st customer who installed it couldn't sign into the app, I was advised by another developer to generate a signed APK (filename: app-release.apk) and then drag it onto my emulator for testing. I did this and i got an error when trying to sign in, so i unpublished the app until i fix this.

I then tried by building an APK which gave me a file: app-debug.apk. I dragged this onto my emulator and was able to sign in with no issues.

Can anyone tell me what i could be doing wrong?

When i run the app from Android Studio onto the emulator, it runs fine, and signs me into my Firebase Database authenticated accounts.

Any help would be appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

You might have enabled obfuscation (R8) for release builds and not written the required -keep rules for it. Without a stack-trace this is quite a theoretical question, but likely it would show a ClassNotFoundException, because the name of some class or class member had been obfuscated, which shouldn't have been obfuscated.

CodePudding user response：

Your project may be using specifying different servers for debug and release builds. This is a common practice when you don't want to corrupt the release database with debug/testing data. See this SO post for an example. I'd check your build gradle and see if I could spot something like this there.

So, the release server may be down, whereas the debug server may still be up and running.