Google Maps not working on release Android bundle

Question

I've seen this question a lot on Internet but nothing works for me.

I have my Android app which uses Google Maps services to display a map.

I've set up two variants: debug and release.

The debug variant has no signing at all, while the release does. I created the corresponding my_app.jks keystore, which is placed in my main /app folder.

My release variant is configured as:

signingConfigs {
    release {
        keyAlias keystoreProperties['keyAlias']
        keyPassword keystoreProperties['keyPassword']
        storeFile keystoreProperties['storeFile'] ? file(keystoreProperties['storeFile']) : null
        storePassword keystoreProperties['storePassword']
    }
}

and the values are set in release-keystore.properties at root level.

In GCP, I generated an API KEY and restricted it to Android apps with both: debug and release fingerprint.

My release fingerprint was created following Google's documentation:

keytool -list -v -keystore your_keystore_name -alias your_alias_name

I entered the requested password and it output the SHA-1 fingerprint. That fingerprint was the one I set on GCP with the correct package name com.my_app.

Then, I run the command

./gradlew :app:bundleGooglePlayRelease

to create the bundle which I manually upload to Google Play Store for Internal Testing. I downloaded the app but the map remains grey.

For my understanding, as the bundle is signed up with the release keystore, the SHA-1 is linked to that bundle so should be enough to authenticate the API KEY.

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Things I've tried but didn't work:

• Run the release variant in an emulator (show grey map, too)
• Hardcode the MAPS_API key is directly in project's Android Manifest to ensure the value is correct
• Creating a separate API KEY, to check there's no issue with restricting the same package name to two different fingerprints
• Try to generate the release fingerprint with wrong keystore values to ensure I have not mistyped any value
  • The build failed, so the values I've used were correct

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UPDATE
Following this solution, I got the SHA-1 from code and printed it. It turns out, it is a different than the one I've locally obtained with the keytool command.

I will work on figuring out why they differ. Any help is welcome.

Answer 1

After some researching and, as Martin Zeitler commented, it was not authenticating the API KEY since the app is using the SHA-1 from Google App Signing

GCP -> SetUp -> App signing

There are three fingerpints:

• MD5
• SHA-1
• SHA-256

linking that SHA-1 to the API KEY, solves the problem