Test Builds & Obtainium
Obtainium installs and auto-updates Android apps straight from their GitHub releases — no Play Store account, no testing-track invite. This page sets it up for Meshtastic and shows how to follow the open beta, closed beta, or snapshot channels.
Heads up — signatures. Builds from GitHub are signed with the project's release key (
CN=Kevin Hester, O=Geeksville Industries), not Google Play's. If you already have Meshtastic installed from the Play Store, Android will refuse to update over it: uninstall the Play Store version first (this clears app data), then install via Obtainium and stay on Obtainium for updates.Switching between the
fdroidandfdroidbuild. Only the origin of a build (Play vs GitHub) determines whether the signatures clash.
Which channels can Obtainium reach?
Meshtastic for Android promotes builds up a ladder: closed → open → production. Each maps to a Google Play track, and the GitHub release is published (un-drafted) when a build is promoted to closed or higher.
| Channel | Play track | On GitHub | Obtainium can install it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| stable | Production | published, marked Latest | ✅ Yes |
| open beta | Beta (Open) | published prerelease, tag vX.Y.Z-open.N | ✅ Yes |
| closed beta | Alpha (Closed) | published prerelease, tag vX.Y.Z-closed.N | ✅ Yes |
| snapshot | — (not on Play) | rolling prerelease, tag snapshot | ✅ Yes |
Each promotion cuts its own tag, and older ones stay published — a whole run of vX.Y.Z-open.N tags accumulates during a version cycle, each still installable with APKs attached. So a channel gathers releases rather than moving a single one forward, and the channel configs below pick the newest release whose title matches the channel.
Which release each channel currently resolves to is deliberately not listed on this page: it is archived per release tag and bundled into the app, so a live version number here would be frozen at build time and wrong within weeks. The project README carries the current state, refreshed automatically.
A channel can legitimately be empty — most often -closed, early in a cycle before any build has been cut to it. The number of published fdroid ABI splits has also changed over time (2.7.14 shipped five, 2.8.0 ships three), which is why the filter matches every split rather than naming ABIs.
Snapshot is different: it's an automated debug build of the latest commit on main, rebuilt and re-published under the single moving snapshot tag on every push. It never goes to Play. Because debug builds use a .debug application-ID suffix (com.geeksville.mesh.fdroid.debug / com.geeksville.mesh.google.debug) and the debug signing key, a snapshot installs as its own separate app — it sits alongside a Play/stable/beta install, so the uninstall-first warning above does not apply to it.
One-tap setup
Tap a link below on the device that has Obtainium installed. Every setting from the rest of this page is already baked into it — pick the channel you want and the flavor you want (which flavor?).
| Channel | google flavor | fdroid flavor |
|---|---|---|
| Stable | Add | Add |
| Open beta | Add | Add |
| Closed beta | Add | Add |
| Bleeding edge (newest promoted test build) | Add | Add |
Snapshot (latest commit on main) | Add | Add |
Prefer a file? Import one of these via Import/Export → Obtainium import. Pick the one matching the flavor you want for the release build; each also sets up both snapshot flavors, which can coexist:
meshtastic-obtainium-export-google.json—googlestable + both snapshotsmeshtastic-obtainium-export-fdroid.json—fdroidstable + both snapshots
How many entries can you have at once?
Obtainium keys apps by application ID, so the rule follows from ours:
| Application ID | Can coexist? | |
|---|---|---|
| Release builds — stable, open, closed, bleeding edge, either flavor | com.geeksville.mesh | No — pick exactly one |
Snapshot, google | com.geeksville.mesh.google.debug | Yes |
Snapshot, fdroid | com.geeksville.mesh.fdroid.debug | Yes |
So one release entry, plus up to both snapshots, is the maximum. Tapping a second release link switches that single entry to the new channel or flavor instead of adding one, and importing both files in turn leaves you with whichever flavor's release entry came last. The snapshots are unaffected either way.
To set things up by hand instead, follow the rest of this page.
Manual setup
- Install Obtainium (GitHub releases or F-Droid / IzzyOnDroid).
- Tap Add App.
- App Source URL:
https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android - Set the options for the channel you want (below).
- Tap Add, then Install.
Stable
- Include prereleases: off
- (optional, stricter) Verify the 'latest' tag: on
- Filter APKs by regular expression: see Picking the APK
Open beta
- Include prereleases: on
- Filter release titles by regular expression:
-open - Filter APKs by regular expression: see Picking the APK
Closed beta
- Include prereleases: on
- Filter release titles by regular expression:
-closed - Filter APKs by regular expression: see Picking the APK
Bleeding edge (newest promoted test build, any channel)
- Include prereleases: on
- Filter release titles by regular expression:
-(closed|open) - Filter APKs by regular expression: see Picking the APK
Obtainium installs the newest promoted prerelease — whatever is currently in open or closed. The title filter is required to skip the always-newer snapshot prerelease; without it Obtainium would follow snapshot instead.
Snapshot (latest commit on main)
- Include prereleases: on
- Filter release titles by regular expression:
^Snapshot - Use the latest asset date as the release date: on
- Version detection: off, with Release date as version on
- Filter APKs by regular expression: debug-signed names, see below
Follows main directly — updates on every push. These are debug builds (.debug package, debug key), so they install as a separate app and won't disturb a stable/beta install. The snapshot tag never changes, so there is no version string to compare — date-based pseudo-versioning is what makes updates detectable.
The APKs are named …-debug-<versionCode>.apk (not -release.apk), so use debug-suffixed filters:
| You want | Regex |
|---|---|
google flavor, most phones (arm64) | google-arm64-v8a-debug-\d+\.apk |
fdroid flavor, most phones (arm64) | fdroid-arm64-v8a-debug-\d+\.apk |
fdroid flavor, one-size-fits-all | fdroid-universal-debug-\d+\.apk |
Snapshot releases attach only the debug APKs — no .aab or desktop installers.
If you build debug locally, uninstall your local build first. CI signs snapshots with its own debug keystore, not yours (
07c16b98…from CI versus88914c61…from a local machine, for example). Since both produce the samecom.geeksville.mesh.<flavor>.debugpackage name, Android refuses the swap withINSTALL_FAILED_UPDATE_INCOMPATIBLE. The "installs as a separate app" note above holds against release builds, not against your own debug builds.
Two more things about release selection apply to every channel above, not just snapshot:
Leave "Fallback to older releases" ON. It is not a channel-strictness setting, and turning it off breaks every channel config here. Obtainium's release loop breaks out after the first candidate when fallback is off, so a title filter never gets to skip past releases that don't match — a config pinned to
-openor^Snapshotthen fails with "Could not find a suitable release" because productionv2.7.14sits at the head of the list. The title filter is what pins the channel; fallback is what lets Obtainium walk down to the newest release that matches it.If your channel filter still finds nothing: that channel has no published release yet — common early in a version cycle. Check the project README for what is live, or use the Bleeding edge form to follow whichever of open/closed is newest.
Picking the APK
Each release attaches the google flavor APK, several fdroid flavor APKs, plus an .aab (not installable) and the desktop installers. Obtainium ignores non-APK assets on its own, but the two flavors share the com.geeksville.mesh package name, so exactly one must be pinned with Filter APKs by regular expression:
| You want | Regex |
|---|---|
Recommended for testing — google flavor | google-release\.apk |
fdroid flavor, most phones (arm64) | fdroid-arm64-v8a-release\.apk |
fdroid flavor, one-size-fits-all | fdroid-universal-release\.apk |
fdroid flavor, let Obtainium pick the ABI | fdroid-.*-release\.apk with Auto-select by architecture on |
Use the google flavor while testing. It ships Firebase Crashlytics and Datadog RUM, so the crashes and errors you hit get reported back to the team — which is the whole point of a test phase. It also has Google push (FCM) and Google Maps. Pick an fdroid flavor only if you'd rather not send that telemetry. You can change your mind later: both flavors share the release key, so Obtainium updates across the flavor boundary without an uninstall. Expect the google flavor to show its analytics-consent screen the first time it starts.
Version detection turns itself off — that's expected
Release tags read vX.Y.Z, while our installed versionName reads X.Y.Z (versionCode) <flavor>. Obtainium tries to reconcile the two against a list of standard version formats, all of which are fully anchored — none of them tolerates the spaces and parentheses in our versionName. So on the first update check Obtainium logs Could not reconcile version formats for: com.geeksville.mesh, sets Version detection to off for the app, and records the release tag as the installed version.
This is harmless and you should not try to fix it. With detection off, Obtainium compares the release tag it last installed against the newest tag, so updates are still detected and installed normally. What you lose is only the ability to notice a version installed outside Obtainium.
In particular, do not set "Trim the version string" to \d+\.\d+\.\d+ hoping to fix it. That setting only rewrites the version parsed from the release; the unparseable side is the installed versionName, which it never touches — so reconciliation fails exactly as before. It also adds a failure mode: if the regex ever matches nothing (a tag without a three-part version), the update check fails outright with a "no version found" error instead of degrading quietly.
Snapshot is a separate case: its tag is the literal string snapshot and never changes, so tag comparison can't work either. Those configs use date-based pseudo-versioning (Release date as version plus Use the latest asset date as the release date) instead.
The config format
An Obtainium app configuration is a flat JSON object. Four keys are required — id (Android package name), url (the GitHub repo, which is what selects the source), author, and name. Everything else goes in additionalSettings, a JSON string nested inside the JSON, so its quotes and backslashes are escaped one extra level. Any key you omit takes its default.
The same object travels in three shapes:
| Shape | Format | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Import/export file | {"apps":[…],"settings":null} | Import/Export → Obtainium import |
| Deep link | obtainium://app/<percent-encoded JSON> | one-tap add with settings baked in |
| Config-site entry | {"configs":[…],"icon","categories","description"} | PRs to apps.obtainium.imranr.dev |
obtainium://add/<url> only prefills the Add-App page; obtainium://app/… is what carries settings. Wrapping a link as https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/redirect.html?r=obtainium://app/… keeps it clickable where a custom scheme wouldn't linkify.
Obtainium keys apps by package name, so the two stable flavors cannot coexist as separate entries — the config-site submission expresses them as alternate configs with an altLabel each. See obtainium/README.md for the full key reference and the submission checklist.
Notes
- Play Protect may interrupt the install with "App scan recommended — Play Protect hasn't seen this app before," offering Scan app or Don't install app. Scan app uploads the APK to Google. Declining cancels the install, so on a device with Play Services you'll need to allow the scan, or install with
adb installinstead. This showed up for a debug-signed snapshot but not for a release-signed build. - Obtainium's first launch shows two full-screen dialogs (a welcome note and a Play-certification note). They swallow an incoming
obtainium://link, so dismiss them before using a one-tap link. - Track without installing: turn on Track-only to get update notifications without Obtainium downloading anything.
- Snapshot filenames carry the versionCode so that a moving tag, which reuses the same release and asset URLs forever, still produces a distinguishable asset on every build.