Tracks & releases

Tracks

Google Play provisions four standard tracks for every app, in promotion order: internal, alpha, beta, production. Beyond those, an app can have closed tracks with custom names (qa-team, external-beta, …) — the only kind gplay can create, because closed testing is the only type the API's create endpoint supports:

gplay tracks create qa-team

There is no tracks delete — the API exposes none; removing a track is a Play Console-only gesture.

The --track flag on release commands is passthrough: any string is accepted, so closed tracks work everywhere the four standard names do. A typo'd track name fails at the API — gplay never auto-creates a track as a side effect.

Safe production defaults

What status a new release gets depends on the target track:

Target track	Default status	Default userFraction
`production`	`draft`	—
`internal` / `alpha` / `beta` / closed	`completed`	`1.0`

Shipping to real users is always explicit: --complete (100%) or --staged <fraction>, and on production those additionally require --confirm. Everything else defaults to the behavior you'd expect from a testing track.

The rollout state machine

Each transition on a staged production rollout is its own verb:

gplay releases rollout --track production --to 0.05   # set userFraction
gplay releases halt --track production                # pause on bad metrics
gplay releases resume --track production              # continue
gplay releases complete --track production            # → 100%, completed

Targeting a release

releases upload <aab> reads the versionCode from the AAB — never a flag, so it can't disagree with the artifact.
promote / rollout / halt / resume / complete target the latest release on the track. Override with --version-code N or --release-name <name>. If two releases coexist on the track (e.g. one inProgress and one halted) and no selector is passed, gplay refuses with exit 60 rather than guess.

Release notes

Two mutually exclusive flags on releases upload:

--release-notes "<text>" — one text, applied to the app's default language.
--release-notes-dir <dir> — one file per locale (en-US.txt, fr-FR.txt, …), with an optional default.txt fallback for locales without a dedicated file.

Country availability

Per-track country availability (syncWithProduction, restOfWorld, targeted countries) is read-only on the API, so gplay surfaces it as a read: gplay tracks availability view --track production. Changing it is a Play Console gesture.