I used to treat closed testing like the first real look at a build. That was a bad habit. You spend days rounding up testers, you wait on the clock, and then someone on Android 12 hits a crash you never saw because the only phone on your desk was already on 15.

These days I do a pre-flight pass first. Nothing fancy. I just want the APK to stand up on more than one OS version before I bother anyone else.

I work in growth marketing, close enough to the Android work that a build often lands in my chat before it lands in Play Console. Someone drops an APK and a short note about what changed. I used to install that file on whatever handset I could borrow. The borrowed phone was almost always the newest one in the office, so of course it looked fine. A local emulator missed a crash that only showed up on real ARM. I stopped treating either as the last stop before testers.

The pass I do now looks like this.

I open DuoPlus in the browser.…