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We have an app that went out to about 11,000 users in an extended open-testing phase. Now we've launched to production and wish to move these users out of the open-testing track and into the production one. We've already paused the open-testing track. But - and I might be misunderstanding something here - it appears that many users are still in the beta-testing program (e.g. it says "Beta" on the Play Store listing for our app for them).

  1. What is the process for moving these users out of open-testing and into production?

  2. What are the consequences of users being stuck in open-testing? In particular, I'm worried that some of these users might not receive production updates. Is this possible? Or will these users automatically get new versions, even if only released on the production track?

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  1. What is the process for moving these users out of open-testing and into production?

You can not do this b automatically, you can point the users to opt out of testing program to receive production updates.

  1. What are the consequences of users being stuck in open-testing? In particular, I'm worried that some of these users might not receive production updates. Is this possible? Or will these users automatically get new versions, even if only released on the production track?

Open-testing users DO NOT receive production updates(this is the whole point of open testing)

My Recommendation:

What I always do in this situation is to ALWAYS release the production version to open testing track before production (you can immediately promote it to production) until I need to test a new feature then the open-testing track will have a higher version of the app to test it out.

the only draw back of this technique is that open-testers can not leave public comment on Google Play's app page.

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    Thank you so much for your answer! What do you think is the best thing to do about the 11k users currently in open-testing? Asking them to leave the beta might work for 80% of them, but I reckon some percent won't bother. Is there anything we can do (e.g. restricting territories for the beta retrospectively or the number of installs or contacting Google)?
    – Jack Kinsella
    Commented Nov 9, 2022 at 9:34
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    I do not think you can convert 80% of beta testers to use the production version, so I still do my recommendation above. but you can restrict beta version to incentify users to convert but you risk losing users.
    – user16930239
    Commented Nov 9, 2022 at 13:31
  • you said that users can't be moved automatically to production, so why do you still use open test even if you release new version firstly to open test?
    – user924
    Commented Dec 16, 2023 at 0:42

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