App version updates and changes

Question

I have some questions about updates and changes to an app version.

I posted an app to the Play Store and didn’t change anything on my Androidmanifest. It was as follows:

package="com.app"
android:versionCode="1"
android:versionName="1.0"

What I’d like to know is, how does Versioncode and Versionname work, and in the posting of an update, what changes occur in them? Should I follow a numerical order? And some apps and software have versions like: 1.1.4. Can you explain this to me?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The versionCode is not shown to users and so it is an incremental internal number to differentiate the various versions, and that allows the Android system not to let the user install an application with lower version than what is already there. Likewise it will also not be possible to put in the Play Store a version with a versionCode lower than what is there.

Good practice says that with each new version versionCode shall be increased by 1.

The versionName is the version that users come from, so it’s just text, and the programmer can write things like:

versionName="1.1-demo"

Typically this version style follows the following nomenclature pattern:

<major>.<minor>.<point>

In which <major> is the version numbering for when you have very large changes, the <minor> is when it has small additions of functionality, and the <point> are usually only minor corrections.

Logo de 1.1.14 for 1.1.15 would just be minor corrections of things that hadn’t gone right.

Of 1.1.14 for 1.2 would be an addition of one or other small functionality.

Of 1.1 for 2.0 would be a very wide difference and/or modification in much of the functionality of the entire application, which may even be incompatible with previous versions.

Official documentation for application versions by Google