Your APK's version code needs to be higher than 100008.

When trying to upload my Android app Crossword Solver CS to the Play store, I have been encountering the error:

Your APK's version code needs to be higher than 100008.

The app is an Ionic/Cordova app and Cordova handles creating that version code.

The 8 on the end makes little sense because the version I had there already was v1.0.0. I checked through git and my config.xml always had the version as v1.0.0.

Cordova claims that the version code will be generated automatically from the string and will be equal to: versionCode = MAJOR * 10000 + MINOR * 100 + PATCH.

For some reason it has followed this formula, then concatenated an '8' on the end making the end result an order of magnitude too big.

As far as I can tell this has come about because I used a Linux VM to generate the initial release and a different machine to generate the update. The latter has a newer version of Ionic/Cordova, which presumably does not have the '8' bug.

How do you fix this? Well, you need to bump up one of the components to multiply your end result by 10 and offset it by 8.

So I have gone from v1.0.0 to v10.0.9, which seems a bit ridiculous.