I'm thinking of changing the name of my application id by appending "-DEBUG" which allows me to install both a release and a debug version of it on the same device (and also helps with stuff like Crashlytics filtering though there are other ways to deal with that) but it poses a problem with the google app engine backend since all the security features are tied to the application name as they should be.

I'm thinking of two possible solutions but wanted to see if anyone else has hit this issue and may have a more elegant approach.

1) instead, I can change the app version via gradle versionNameSuffix though this doesn't allow the two version of the app to co-exist

2) register both app ids with the app engine backend

Am I thinking about this the wrong way? In general, how do people deal with Release vs QA instances of their apps and setting up corresponding versions of their backends? Also, do the Release vs QA backend instances share the same data store? Thanks.