As many people know, AppCenter will be retired in the near future. I am currently using it to distribute an Android app built with Xamarin directly to the end users (along with crashlytics and events).

The app is registered to an AppCenter repository and when I publish a new release, a popup shows up forcing the update. This behaviour has to be maintained as much as possible.

I’ve seen that Firebase offers most of the needed features, but the distribution process is different and probably meant only for testers. Is that the case?

If so, what are the AppCenter replacements? (Needless to say publishing to PlayStore is not an option, because of the above mentioned business constraints).