Building and Releasing a .NET MAUI App to Google Play Using Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines
Shipping a .NET MAUI Android app is often harder than building it — keystores, Play Console permissions, and CI signing have to line up before Google Play will accept a build. Ruslan Dudchenko maps the full path from project setup to an automated internal-track upload with Azure DevOps YAML.
What you’ll learn
- Android signing basics — keystore, key alias, store/key passwords, and how Play App Signing turns your CI keystore into an upload key
- Google Play service connection — creating a Cloud service account, granting Play Console upload permissions, enabling the Android Developer API, and wiring the DevOps extension
- YAML pipeline end to end — install the MAUI workload, sign with Secure Files + secret variables, publish the signed
.aabartifact, and release withGooglePlayRelease@4 - Automated versioning — bumping
ApplicationVersion/versionNamefrom the build ID and usingandroid-manifest-versionso every upload is unique - First-release gotchas — Secure Files approval on the first run, draft-app uploads with
isDraftRelease: true, and avoiding hyphens in the package ID that break the upload task
Read the full article for the complete YAML listing, .csproj Release settings, and the linked sample repository you can use as a starting point.