Unfortunately google has these draconian requirements for personal developer accounts, where they require “at least 12 testers to be opted-in for at least 14 days” during this “Closed Testing” phase, just to unblock production access.

APK sideloads do not count as far as I know.

I understand the motivation (reducing abuse and malware), but it does make things harder for small personal developers. Business accounts don’t have this requirement, so I may look into that.

Sorry for that, I’ve clarified in the post.

You need to be signed in to google to join the group. If so then you can click on the app links and install in on the android device.

The account you use to join the group must be the same on the target android device.

I have images less than 1Mb, both jpg and png. The upload always fails either on the post or here in the comments. I’ll try some different formats.

Don’t even get me started on these requirements by google for personal developer accounts. This is a mandatory testing phase before they give me access to production. The google group is necessary for the app links to be unblocked for that particular google account.

I 100% understand the pain this is, but not sure I can do anything more to simplify the process.

My conclusion as of late is that I should just create a business google account to skip this haha.

Are you referring to the Google Group link?

It may show “You don’t have permission to access this content”, but if you are logged in to Google you should see a “Join/Access Group” link no?

Isn’t the imgur link working? I tried uploading the imgs directly but it was always failing.