[Nazgulled]

I'm trying to become a tester on Google Play for Kodi 18 but it says my account is not part of the tester group/community.

Is that community restricted? How can I be part of that?

[da-anda]

you can always test by sideloading a nightly apk from http://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/android/

[da-anda]

I just talked to our Android guys and the beta program has been abandoned. Main reason is that a) there won't be betas in the next months (only alphas, and those won't be pushed to playstore) and b) participents tended to forget they are part of the testing group and complained once they got a beta update. So in the end it caused more harm than good.

As mentioned above - if you'd like to test nightlies, feel free to sideload them from the link above. But please note that nightlies will replace your current Kodi installation - so they won't co-exist side by side. And once you're on a nightly, it's hard to go back to 17.3 unless you created a backup of your userdata upfront and restore it.

[Nazgulled]

The idea was to avoid manual updates by sideloading. The Play Store allows to push betas and alphas separately. You could just upload the nightlies to the alpha channel automatically from the CI Server. Perhaps giving access to only to people who request it and understand what they are getting into.

But I understand if that's something you don't want to to worry about.

Thanks for clarification