Google Play console reporting crashes from unreleased applications

Question

I would like to share a situation I am facing analysing the new features at Google Play console and try to find a solution for it.

As many of you may already know, Google has released updates at Google Play console and introduced Android vitals. One of the good particularities is that now the session ANRs & Crashes shows all ANRs & crashes collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data (during phone first setup).

However, I am seeing crash reports from unreleased applications. I mean, from a developer version that hasn't been published yet. Moreover, this crash report came from an application signed with an android-debug key, not my production key. I have looked into the available documentation but I couldn't found details on the filtering for these reports.

It seems harmful and wrong to me using any income data without validating signing as anyone can simply write a short peace of code and start flooding a specific application package name with tons of dummy stacktraces.

Do you know if this is the normal behavior for this new tool ?

Answer 1

As we are interested in publishing only release applications, we may adopt following strategy to get rid of messing up crash reports :

./build.gradle :

android {     ...     defaultConfig {         applicationId "my.app.package"         ...     }     ...     buildTypes {         release {             ...         }         debug {             ...             applicationIdSuffix ".dev"         }     } ... }