After 7 iterations of staring blankly at crash logs, wrestling with Google Cloud OAuth scopes, and questioning my life choices as a solo developer, Sprout Atlas is finally ready for its Google Play release.
Building an AI-powered produce scanner using Flutter, Firebase, and RevenueCat sounds great on paper. In practice? Let's just say getting the native authentication and subscription pipeline to shake hands across multiple build variants is a rite of passage.
Here is a quick look at the major hurdles I had to clear by version 1.0.7:
- The Silent Google Sign-In Failure Everything worked locally on my emulator. But the moment I downloaded the internal test build from the Play Console, tapping "Sign in with Google" would open the account picker, select my email, and then... nothing. It bounced right back to the login screen.
The Culprit: A classic SHA-1 mismatch. When you upload an Android App Bundle (.aab) to Google Play, Google strips out your local debug/upload keystore's SHA-1 and replaces it with the Play App Signing key.
The Fix: Grabbing the App Signing certificate SHA-1 from the Play Console, adding it to Firebase, downloading a fresh google-services.json, cleaning the build cache (flutter clean), and pushing a clean update.
- Wiring RevenueCat to Google Play Billing Handling paywalls locally is easy; syncing them securely with Google Play's backend without triggering sandbox errors is another story. Ensuring that once a user subscribes, their entitlement unlocks instantly—and grants their daily AI scan quota—took careful state management alongside FirebaseAuth and RevenueCat.
What's Next?
If you're building in public and fighting with OAuth configurations or Play Console deployment hurdles, hang in there. Version 7 is the charm.
Sprout Atlas is heading into its final testing rounds. Let me know in the comments if you've ever spent an entire weekend debugging a single Google Cloud credential! 🚀
Top comments (1)
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.