Understanding Live App Testing

With Amazon's Live App Testing (LAT) service, you can distribute an app that you intend to publish to the Amazon Appstore to a pre-defined set of testers before going live. You can distribute both APK and VPKG binary types within your current live app tests. To make sure your app is working as expected, testers can sample the full suite of Amazon services against Amazon's production environment. Examples of features you can test include the following APIs and services:

In-App Purchasing (IAP)
Facebook integration and connectivity
Amazon Device Messaging

Before you publish your app, you can use LAT to gather feedback, improve quality, increase stability, and optimize the experience . Your tests show you exactly what your customers would see if the app were live in the Amazon Appstore.

Tip: You can now submit up to five live app tests in parallel for an individual app. With multiple active tests, you can test features in independent tracks. This means that when you add or remove testers, or reset in-app purchases within a specific test, it doesn't affect the other active tests for your app.

Presubmission testing workflow

If you're testing both an APK and VPKG version of your app, consider the following points:

Rather than submitting both binary files to the same test, Amazon recommends creating a separate LAT test for each binary.
If you do submit both APK and VPKG binary types to the same test, the "promote to upcoming" option is not available. The test must have only one binary type to use the promote to upcoming option.

The following image shows the LAT process for an individual test.

See the following steps. — LAT workflow for an individual test

High-level description of the LAT workflow:

Submit an app package (APK or VPKG) of your app to LAT. You can test additional packages of your app (up to five) in parallel by creating new tests.
Have your group of testers test your app using LAT:
1. Add your testers to tester groups. If you create multiple LAT tests for an app, you'll add the tester groups separately for each live app test.
2. For each test you create, have the testers from each tester group download the associated app package and start testing.
Evaluate your tester feedback.
Based on the test results and feedback, make any changes to your app. Test the changes by adding an upcoming version to the existing live app test.
When you're satisfied with your test results, you can choose to promote a version from your active tests to be published live on the Amazon Appstore.

If your test has both APK and VPKG binaries, you can adjust the tester groups as needed and then continue testing on the other binary type.

Versioning your app to promote to live

To be eligible to promote your app to go live, the version code or build number of the LAT app must be greater than the version of the currently live app. Therefore, if you have multiple live app tests running at the same time, you must increase the version of the app you want to promote to be higher than the live app.

Consider this example:

You have two tests, "Test 1" and "Test 2", where the value of the version code or build number of Test 1 is less than or equal to the version of the app in Test 2.
For example, Test 1 has version 100 and Test 2 has version 101.
You promote the app from Test 2 (version 101) to go live, and later want to promote the app from Test 1 (version 100) to go live.

To promote the app from Test 1 to live, you must first increase the version code or build number to be greater than that of the currently live app from Test 2. In this example, Test 1 must have a version of 102 or greater to be eligible to go live.

Tip: You can use Receipt Verification Service to verify purchase receipts generated from LAT In-App Purchasing (IAP) orders.

Get Started with Live App Testing

Last updated: Mar 12, 2025

Understanding Live App Testing

Presubmission testing workflow

Related topics