Publish to the Google Play Store

Heads up... You've reached locked video content where the transcript will be shown as obfuscated text.

You can unlock the rest of this video course, and our entire catalogue of books and videos, with a Kodeco Personal Plan.

Unlock now

In this episode you will learn how to build your app for release. Before you dive into building a release version of a app, you'll 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 Google 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 the resources for all device configurations like images, strings, layouts, et cetera. 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 optimize 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 App Bundle format to publish your app. You can 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 assigned Android App Bundle. With your project open in Android studio, select Build, Generate Signed Bundle/APK, Select Android App Bundle, click Next. Below key store path, select Create new. Provide Key store path, select path you like. Here I select documents and name key store as upload keystore. Enter a password and Confirm it. Enter Alias for the key. Alias is an identifying name for your key. Provide password. Then set the length of the time in years that your key will be valid. Your key should be valid for at least 25 years. So you can signed app updates with the same key throughout 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 Export encrypted key for enrolling published apps in Google Play App Signing. This you check if you wish to enroll your older already published app for Google Play App Signing. In our case, let's leave it unchecked. Click Next. Verify or change the destination folder for Generated Signed Bundled. Select Build Variants at 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. This is the Signed Bundle which you'll use to upload on Google Play. Well done. What next? Google Play Console UI is recently changed. So in next episode, you will see what's new in Google Play Console.