Publish to the Google Play Store

In this episode, you will see how to create a production release. You will ideally do so for your app after fixing all observations from testers from different testing tracks.

Login to google play console, and click on the app for which you would like to create a production release. Before creating prodcution release, leanr what is Managed Publishing.

Click Publishing overview in the left navigation panel. Click Manage which is to right of Managed publishing status. With managed publishing, you control when updates to your app are published on Google Play. You can turn managed publishing on or off at any time.

If it is on, any changes that are in review won’t go live until you decide. If it is off, any changes that are in review will go live as soon as those are approved. To know more about managed publishing, when should you use it nad what kind of changes are held back by Managed publishing, refer to the link in resources for this episode.

Keep Manage Publishing OFF for this app. Click Save. Click Production in the left navigation panel. There are three tabs - Release Dashboard, Releases and Countries/Regions. In order to publish to production, you need to include add atlease one country from here.

You can also add/remove countries from here. Click Add Countries/regions. You can make your app available to all countires by checking the check box next to Country/Region. Search United States and add it. Now click Releases. Click Create new release.

If Create new release is disabled, you may have outstanding setup tasks to complete. These may be listed on the Dashboard page. Either upload app bundle from your local or click add from library. Here it will show all the bundles you have previously uploaded in any of the testing tracks.

In our case, I Select the one we uploaded for internal testing. Click Add to rleease. Update Release name.

Update Release Notes or copy from any of the previous releases in any of the tracks.

Click Save. Click Review Release. Click Start rollout to Production. The Update status will change to In Review. After Google reviews your app, you’ll receive an email about whether it’s approved or needs more work.

If it’s approved, and managed publishing is off, it gets automatically published and you’ll receive a notification email.

If your app requires additional work, you’ll receive an email with specific information about what needs improvement. Address the issues and resubmit your app for review.

The review duration depends on how many apps have recently been submitted for review and how many corrections your app needs. It can take upto seven days or even longer in exceptional cases. One more key feature related to Production releases is: Staged Rollout.

You can release an app update to production and test tracks using a staged rollout. With a staged rollout, your update reaches only a percentage of your users, which you can increase over time.

Staged rollouts can only be used for app updates, not when publishing an app for the first time. You can learn more about staged rollout from this page, link for which is provided in the resources.