Bump version code for Android apps using GitHub Actions
Play Store, since the beginning of time, had the same policy about versioning: every artifact uploaded and served from Play Store should have a unique version code. And this is a reasonable requirement for tracking reasons.
The only downside is that they leave the developer the responsibility of bumping and maintaining the version code. There’s no way to “auto-increase” the version code. The version code is stored in the build.gradle file which means the codebase needs to be touched for the version code to be kept in sync with what you are uploading to the store.
To automate the process of bumping the version code and then committing the updated version to the codebase, we can have a GitHub Action (if you use GitHub; but the equivalent can be created for other sites) that does the “boring” work for us. More specifically, the process can be as follow:
