Staged Rollout

A staged rollout ships a release to a percentage of users on a track (usually production) rather than all users at once. Typical stages: 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 100%.

Why it matters

If a release has a bug, you catch it with 5% of users affected rather than 100%. You can halt the rollout, ship a fix, and resume. Staged rollouts are the single most important risk-reduction pattern for mobile releases.

Google Play supports rollout percentages between 0.5 and 100. Only the production track supports staged rollouts; internal, alpha, and beta tracks are all-or-nothing.

How GPC handles it

Start a release at 10%:

gpc releases upload app.aab --track production --rollout 10

Promote from beta to production at 5%:

gpc releases promote --from beta --to production --rollout 5

Increase an in-progress rollout:

gpc releases rollout increase --track production --to 50

Halt a rollout (users already at the previous percentage keep the release; no new users get it):

gpc releases rollout halt --track production

Complete the rollout to 100%:

gpc releases rollout complete --track production

For automated stage progression with time and vitals gates, describe the stages in .gpcrc-train.json and start the train:

// .gpcrc-train.json
{
  "stages": [
    { "track": "production", "rollout": 1 },
    { "track": "production", "rollout": 5, "after": "1d" },
    { "track": "production", "rollout": 25, "after": "2d" },
    { "track": "production", "rollout": 100, "after": "4d" }
  ],
  "gates": {
    "crashes": { "max": 2 },
    "anr": { "max": 0.5 }
  }
}

gpc train start

Common issues

• Fastlane rollout format mismatch — Fastlane uses decimals (0.1 = 10%); GPC uses integers (10 = 10%). Most common migration bug.
• Rollout halted accidentally — halted rollouts do not auto-resume. Must run gpc releases rollout resume.
• Crash spike during rollout — put gates in the train config, or pass --vitals-gate to gpc releases rollout increase, to stop a ramp on threshold breach.

Related

• gpc releases rollout — all rollout subcommands
• gpc train — automated staged rollout pipeline
• gpc vitals — monitor crash / ANR rates during rollout
• Play Edit Lifecycle — how rollout changes are committed atomically