Publish to the Google Play Store

In this episode, you will learn how to build your app for release. Before you dive into building a release version of your app, you will see a brief introduction about Android App Bundle

Why learning about Android App Bundle is important?

It is important because From August 2021, new apps are required to publish with the Android App Bundle on Google Play. And New apps larger than 150 MB are now supported by either Play Feature Delivery or Play Asset Delivery - both of which use App bundle.

An Android App Bundle is a new publishing format for Android apps that helps to deliver an optimized version of your APK by just including what your users need, reducing your app size and making your users happier. :]

Normally, when users download your app, they get what is called a universal APK. This is a file that contains all resources for all device configurations, like images, strings, layouts etc. Users will not need all of them, which will waste space and leave less room for apps or games. So users get hit on both data and storage.

Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app.

When you use the app bundle format to publish your app, you can also optionally take advantage of Play Feature Delivery, which allows you to add feature modules to your app project.

Game developers who publish their apps with app bundles can use Play Asset Delivery. Also, Just like APKs have .apk extension, App bundles have .aab extension and if you are curious to deep dive into Android app Bundle or want to know more about play feature delivery, please refer to links in resources for this episode. You will now switch to Android Studio to generate a signed android app bundle.

With your project open in Android Studio, select Build > Generate Signed Bundle/APK. Here, you will get two choices. Android App Bundle and APK. Select Android App Bundle , click Next. Below Keystore Path, select Create New. Provide Key Store path. Select path you like. Here, I select Desktop and name keystore as upload-keystore. Enter a password and confirm it.

Enter Alias for the Key. Alias is an identifying name for your key. I enter upload-keystore here. Enter and confirm a secure password for your key.

Then, Set the length of time in years that your key will be valid. Your key should be valid for at least 25 years, so you can sign app updates with the same key through the lifespan of your app.

Also, Enter some information about yourself or organization for your certificate. You only need to add one for this part of the form to be valid.

Click OK. Check Remember passwords. Check Export encrypted key , if you wish to enroll your already published app for Google Play App signing. In our case, let’s leave it unchecked. Click Next.

Select Destination Folder for the bundle. I select Desktop. Select build variant as release and click Finish You get notification at bottom right, when bundle is ready.

Click Locate and you see, app-release.aab, generated under release folder on Desktop. This is the signed bundle, which we will use to upload to Google Play.

WELL DONE! WHAT NEXT?

Google Play Console UI is recently changed, so in the next episode, you will see What’s new in Google Play Console.