fastlane supply: Google Api Error (Google Play)

fastlane is an awesome tool to release your iOS and Android apps. It handles all your tedious tasks, like generating screenshots, dealing with code signing, and releasing your application. From my experience fastlane is pretty reliable and a true blessing when developing mobile applications. supply is the component of fastlane that is responsible for updating Android apps (binaries), release management (e.g. beta & alpha tracks) and the respective metadata (store listing and screenshots) on the Google Play Store.

Using supply to automate the alpha releases, I had to deal with the following error message:

[10:04:54]: Updating track 'alpha'...
[10:04:55]: Uploading all changes to Google Play...

[!] Google Api Error: multiApkShadowedActiveApk: Version 2100384 of this app can not be downloaded by any devices as they will all receive APKs with higher version codes.

Not only does this complication keep the builds failing, it also prevents releasing new alpha builds – therefore effectively jamming the release cycle. According to a related GitHub Issues the error gets triggered after promoting a release directly from alpha to production (skipping the beta track). As of this writing there is a pretty fresh (14 hours old) Pull Request, which tries to circumvent the outlined problem. Until the possible fix is released, you can workaround the problem by manually uploading a new APK to the alpha track. All subsequent builds should be fixed.


  • The described problem could be reproduced with supply 2.19.0 on Ubuntu 16.04.