A complete debugging journey through automating a multi-app Android release pipeline — from local builds burning out a free tier, to a Google Play error message that was actively lying to us about its own cause.
TL;DR
We ship two separate Android apps (staff and student/parent) from one Expo React Native codebase, distinguished by an env var at build time. EAS's free build tier kept running out mid-sprint, and running builds locally instead was frying a developer's laptop for twenty minutes at a time — so the actual goal was to move Android builds and Play Store releases off EAS entirely and onto GitHub Actions, where we already had free CI minutes. Along the way:
EAS's free build tier ran out — building locally on a laptop instead doesn't scale either.
A gitignored local counter decided our version numbers — it doesn't survive a fresh CI runner, so we silently shipped v1.0.1-b2 when we meant v1.1.1-b10.
