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If you able / willing to enroll the devices in Intune you can use Azure App Center to deploy and update Android apps without the play store.

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We use both appcenter.ms and the internal test track features of the Play Store. On boarding an external user into appcenter takes a few more emails/clicks but they both accomplish similar use cases for us.

There is a small caveat to that as I mentioned app center requires you to enroll the devices into Intune which is the Microsoft MDM which might not be possible to do in all cases.

If that is an option that is agreeable to you and your users then using app center does provide a better experience than Google Play in my opinion.

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