I have been hacking around with both Android and iOS development for about a month now, and have successfully setup both my iPhone as well as my Samsung Galaxy to be test devices, and I have deployed apps to those phones, directly from the respective IDEs, meaning:
So far so good.
I'm looking to take these deployments one step further, but not "production" (live and available to the public in their respective stores).
I'm wondering if Apple/Google have "staging stores" where I can vet out my deployment pipeline and perhaps upload/deploy these apps to some store where only I (and perhaps a handful of beta testers) have access. Either that, or perhaps there is a way to limit access/visibility to apps inside of their stores before the apps are ready for full bore release.
I'm looking for a solution that would work not only for my first release (v1) but also any subsequent v2, v3, etc. releases as well. Any ideas?
I can't comment on Apple. But Google Play has Alpha and Beta publishing which lets you publish an app to a limited Group of users you choose. It sounds like Alpha is what you want.
All the details are on this help documentation
Furthermore, an Alpha app won't be visible to anyone besides Alpha users until you do a public, production release.