r/Androiddev took this post down so thought maybe I could help someone on SO, even though it doesn’t appear I can make a post here only ask a question.

Hopefully my hours of frustration saves someone some time. I was working on an android app that still uses XML navigation and I was testing the app on both an emulator and a phone and it worked perfectly, no crashes or issues. Then I went to google play uploaded a signed bundle to internal testing and downloaded the app. To my surprise the app would not open and immediately closed. I opened the SKD tool terminal and it just said that my app had a fatal error on my navigation. So I kept trying everything and found out that if you have minifyEnabled set to true it apparently makes this fatal error occur. I’m not sure if there is some workaround to keep minify but I’m too exhausted to care at this point.

On a side note if you want to load the latest version of your app bundle from playstore on your phone go to a PC and open the web link and load the app to your phone from the PC.

Went through a lot of changes in the navigation graph, removing and clearing dependencies that I thought might be causing the issue.