Release notes for Google Play

[maurovanetti]

Hi! This is my first question here.

We publish our Flutter app simultaneously to Google Play and App Store (and Huawei AppGallery, actually). This app is in Italian only.
We have put the release notes in a text file called release_notes_it.txt, which worked perfectly for iOS but failed with Google Play. The workflow completed and the new release was published but it has empty release notes.
What's wrong? Thanks for your help.

Documentation: https://docs.codemagic.io/yaml-notification/publish-release-notes/#setting-up-release-notes

[himesh-cm]

Do you mean the other way around?
Because apple supports it .json only.

[maurovanetti]

Yes, the default language is Italian. It's the only language actually.
(Thank you again for your help.)

[himesh-cm]

In that case, can you try the below solution if it works?
Just keep release_notes.txt instead of release_notes_it.txt

This will fail for iOS, but it will help debug the issue, so maybe you want it to test in the internal track or something.

Make sure it's in the root directory. Let me know how it goes.

[maurovanetti]

For the way the workflow is organised it's a bit complicated to launch a test run that includes the deploy step (we have the internal test tracks on DeployGate instead of the official stores), but we have many releases and I can easily do an experiment soon. I might even automatically rename the file for Android only.

[maurovanetti]

OK, I could not test release_notes.txt but I found something else that may lead us to the explanation of this issue.

I have now managed to have a completely automated system by creating a release_notes.json file like this:

[
  {
    "language": "it-IT",
    "text": "..."
  },
  {
    "language": "it",
    "text": "..."
  }
]

Apparently, for the Italian locale App Store uses it and Google Play uses it-IT. I guess this also explains why release_notes_it.txt worked for Apple but failed for Google: the latter expected release_notes_it-IT.txt.

[himesh-cm]

Thanks for sharing @maurovanetti