Handing someone a test build was a trap. A prerelease sorts BELOW its own release — 1.9.25-fix234d
is semver-older than 1.9.25 — so a sideloaded display asked "anything newer?", was correctly told
yes, and updated itself straight back off the build we had asked someone to test. Same versionCode,
so Android installed it without complaint. Silent, and within minutes.
That is what happened on #234: the reporter installed the fix, tested for an evening, and reported
nothing had changed. They were right. Their tablet was running the old code again by then, and I had
told them it was fixed without ever checking what the device reported.
Adds a per-display opt-in (devices.ota_beta, default 0, checkbox next to the OTA toggle). When set,
the display keeps a prerelease of the CURRENT core instead of being pulled back to its release.
Deliberately narrow in one direction and deliberately wide in the other:
- Narrow: it only holds a prerelease of the core already installed. A plain release, a -patchN
build, an upgrade to a newer core, and a display ahead of the server all behave exactly as before,
and the flag defaults off so a fleet that never sets it is unaffected.
- Wide: an opted-in display is exempted from the superseded-prerelease guard. That guard would
otherwise pin a tester on an old test build permanently — an older-core prerelease is never
offered anything, so they would have to notice and sideload their way out. Writing the test is
what surfaced that; opting in must never mean never updating again.
9 tests covering both directions, including that shipping a newer release pulls a beta display back
onto the release line. 845 server tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
301c76c3f7