Can I have more than one similar extensions uploaded to the store

[Mostafa Elsaie]

Hi everyone,

I have a quick question. I already have my extension uploaded to the store and people are using it however, I'd like to change my deployment strategy. That's why I'd like to upload 2 new extensions (2 copies of my current extension) and give them different ID's to support deploying the extension to BETA, ALPHA and LIVE customers. Would this be a problem? Am I allowed to have a number of similar extensions on the store with different ID's?

P.S the BETA & ALPHA extensions are planned to be "UNLISTED" in the store.

Thanks a bunch for your help in advance.

Best regards,

Mostafa

[David]

Interesting question.

I would think the beta and alpha versions could be distributed the unofficial way, sending over the CRX file, although I think I recall Chrome recently disallowed installing extensions not hosted in the Web Store? Wonder what's Google's approach to this beta/alpha/internal use scenario is. Maybe there's a workaround to install externally hosted CRXs, but I'm not aware of the process.

Wonder how other extension stores do it for alpha, beta, release (e.g. Mozilla addons, Safari extensions, Opera extensions).

[Herinson]

I've tried this yesterday. 

I published an extension which is already published with a version name like 2.0.0-beta.0. Then, I just added a new icon to make them look different.

This beta extension was published as private only for trusted testers. I didn't put a description on it nor screenshots.

Guess what? The beta extension was reject.

Reason: no description provided.

I'm going to try again with a description. By the way, these private option should be 'locked'. 

I mean, once you publish an extension as private, it can be converted to public.

This would be a nice feature.

[Antony Sargent]

You should contact webstore developer support for questions like this:

https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/developer_support

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[Mostafa Elsaie]

Thank you all for the replies, I got my reply back from the webstore engineers and they informed me that this could only be permitted if each of the extensions has some code changes in it. The extensions can be similar in code but they can never be the same.

Hope this helps!

Best regards,

Mostafa