I use it as a way to distribute the game I'm working on.
The Google Play side of things is quite easy, you add it as an alpha or a beta (specifically you can have both allowing two groups of users, one that has stable builds and another that has experimental ones) and it takes a couple of hours for builds to go live at which point their android devices automatically update.
The management side of things is a bit more awkward. You need to add the people to a Google Group or a Google+ circle, personally I used a Google Group as a good place for them to leave feedback. Once they've accepted the Google Group invite there is a completely separate link they need to follow to accept the beat invite. We've had quite a few problems with this, for one it seems if they try to accept the invite from their phone, Google Play Store doesn't play nice with the email links and following it can take you to an 'app not available' page within the Play Store. You have to tell it to follow the link using Chrome rather than the default Play Store for it to work.
Even once you've accepted the link and are a beta tester, you can not find the app by searching the Play Store, the only place you can really see it is the 'My Apps' section, with a few other exceptions it behaves exactly like a full release game would to the beta testers, they aren't allowed to rate the app for example.
Overall, I'm happy I use it because making sure everyone was using the up to date version of the app was becoming a bit of a pain to code for, especially when I make big sweeping changes to the way points are scored etc and this is way superior to sending out the apks but at times I've had to talk people through the process of accepting the Google Group invite, accepting the beta testers invite and successfully downloading the game for the first time. After that though, everything is sweet.
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