Staged rollouts for submitting updates to live apps on Amazon Appstore is now available. Staged rollouts provide a way to limit the radius of impact when you introduce upgrades to your app by releasing the updates to your customers in stages. This feature allows you to evaluate if a dial-up is going as expected before releasing the update to 100% of the install base. Learn more about how to get started with staged rollouts by reading the tech docs.

With staged rollouts, you can publish an app update to a small percentage of your customers and increase that percentage before publishing it to your entire customer base. For example, if your release crashes, it's better if only 1% of users experience this rather than your entire user base. The staged rollout feature is supported for apps that have historically yielded 10,000+ unique app installs within the past three years. You can see how many users have installed your app in the Reporting metrics in the Amazon Developer Console.

Getting started with staged rollouts

To get started with staged rollouts, go to the Developer Console under “Upcoming Version” and fill in all the metadata and APK details, then select the staged rollout button. You can select 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%, or 50% of your audience to receive the update from the pop-up window. Once submitted, after doing the required validation, the app update will be pushed out to a randomized set of customers who have already downloaded your app and continue to dial up until the percentage you set is reached.
 

Staged rollout options
 

If any issues are discovered with the app update, you can stop the staged rollout, edit the APK, and resume the staged dialup. Staged rollouts can be resumed with the same percentage of customers or you can select a higher percentage. After confirming everything works as expected, select “App Submit” to submit the update to 100% of your customers.
 

Increase the staged rollout percentage or halt the staged rollout.
 

Resume staged rollout

Submit an app update to 100% of your customers
 

During staged rollouts, the customers who receive the update will see the live version of metadata (images, multimedia, description, etc.). After the app is published to 100% of customers, the metadata is updated for all customers.

Due to limitations, staged rollouts are not supported if you are introducing an in-app purchase to an app for the first time and/or if there are content rating changes.

Additional information

All the required documentation for staged rollouts can be found in our technical documentation. Please contact us for any additional questions.