My company did a production quality test release of our Android app as an Internal Beta release. You can manage your internal testing releases in the Google Play Console under Home>Your App>Test and release>Testing>internal testing. These internal releases could only be downloaded from the app store by users added to the internal testing user group, who were sent a link that redirected them to the app store. Here is more information about Internal Testing of Android apps, it works for up to 100 invited users: