Gitea artifacts need an account with read access to download, which makes
them useless for handing a build to someone outside the project -- the
actual reason a test APK gets built in the first place.
An optional publish input attaches the APK to a pre-release instead,
whose assets are a plain public URL on a public repo. No merge to master,
no MR, no version tag, and the tester needs no account.
Safe from a feature branch on two counts. The tag is test-<branch> rather
than v*, and only v* triggers build-release.yml, so nothing else reacts
to it. And it cannot reach existing users: the desktop updater reads a
static latest.json from the updater branch, not the release list.
Re-dispatching the same branch replaces the APK on the existing
pre-release rather than accumulating one release per attempt.
build-release.yml is tag-driven, builds three platforms and then creates
a release -- none of which is what you want from a feature branch, and
there was otherwise no way to get an installable build out of CI without
cutting one.
workflow_dispatch only, deliberately. The runner has a single slot shared
with two other projects, so an APK on every feature-branch commit would
starve them; dispatch it when you actually want to install something.
Defaults to the R8-minified release build in the debug applicationId slot
rather than a plain debug APK. Minification is where Android releases
have actually broken here (R8 stripping JNI-loaded player and security
classes), and a debug build cannot catch it. Neither variant needs the
real signing key, and both install side by side with a real install.
Builds through scripts/build-android.sh rather than a hand-rolled tauri
invocation, so CI and a developer's machine produce the same thing and
the script's applicationId assertion still runs. Shares the existing
cargo registry cache key -- no fourth copy of the registry on a disk that
has filled before.
dtourolle