Android CI Pipeline Failures Traced to Wrong Play Store Track and Silent YAML Bug

A developer series documenting the automation of a multi-app Android release pipeline reveals how a misleading Google Play error message led to prolonged debugging. The root cause turned out to be that the pipeline was publishing to an empty 'alpha' track, while the actual live releases for the staff app lived on a separately named custom track. The student app escaped the issue only because its active track happened to be named 'alpha' — a coincidence that masked the misconfiguration. The fix involved splitting the shared track-name variable into separate per-app settings rather than assuming one value would work for both. A secondary bug in GitHub Actions was also uncovered, one that silently halted entire workflow files without producing any error output.