Today I want to give an overview of things you should do to publish application on Android Market. Hope it would be useful for you.
OK, so let’s start from the very beginning.
1. Idea
Yep, idea – is what you should prepare first. It would be great to prepare well-formed and described plan of your application. You should answer yourself – “Why someone needs you app?” , “How could it help?”, “What is the aim of this app?”. These questions are really important to create cool application, and it’s not only for Android – it’s applicable for all the software. It may be also good to think about what do YOU need, what can help YOU and with this you can start describing your app.
2. Implement & Test
So, I hope at this point you have determined for yourself what you are going to create. It’s essential to obtain high-quality application for Android platform. As concerns technical side of development you may want to take a look at Google Docs, particularly you may be interested in Getting Started section and in Sample Code section. By the way, we are going to post some interesting practical tutorials, say “How to” series. Subscribe to our RSS feed and Email feed to be informed about it.
As usual and as we do it, keep your code clear, readable, well-commented and make it works smoothly. Keep in mind that it is really important to keep application working well, your user do not care why it crashed, so it should not. Ever.
When you’ve finished with development part, you definitely should test your Android application. Perform full-coverage test, try to break it down, do everything user can do with your app. It would be great if you can ask someone else to help you with testing, it may be very helpful. Try to get some feedback on usability and user-experience, it will give you an idea about what you should modify in your application.
When you done testing, got feedback and done necessary modifications, you should re-test it once again. And now your app is almost ready to be published!
3. Android Market account. Signing. EULA
It should be clear and simple. If you do not have an Android Market account yet, you should get one.
Before you can publish an application you should sign it with your own certificate. When you develop an Android Application in Eclipse it is automatically signed for you with debug certificate. You should sign it manually with your own certificate.
Key things to do here are:
- Export unsigned application using Eclipse
To do so you need to right-click package name and select Android Tools -> Export Unsigned Application. Then you should specify path to store your apk. - Generate your own certificate
There is an utility in JDK – keytool.exe. You will use it to generate your own certificate. Command that will generate certificate for you looks like:
keytool –genkey –v –keystore somename.keystore –alias somename –keyalg RSA –validity 10000
You will be prompted for some info in a command line, including password you want to use for your keystore. Keep it safe. And keep in mind that your certificate should be valid till 22 October 2033. As a result keytool.exe will generate keystore named somename.keystore. You will use it to sign your Android applications. - Sign your application with your own certificate
Now you have your own certificate and Android application which you want to publish on Market. So you need to sign it using jarsigner.exe (it’s also included in JDK). You will use the following command to sign your app:
jarsigner -verbose -keystore somename.keystore PathToYourApp.apk somename
And that’s it! Your Android application is signed with your certificate!
You may also want to take a look at Google Signing Guide, there is detailed guide on signing Android application.
You may also want to have EULA. Seems that EULA is not required to publish your application on Market, but it’s a good practice to protect yourself by concluding an agreement with your users. You can take a look at our guide on adding EULA to Android app.
4. Finally…Publish!
And finally, you are ready to publish your application. Thanks Google, it really simple – select Android application to upload, enter description, choose category and upload it! After your app is uploaded, you can publish it.
That’s all – you application is ready to be downloaded!
Related posts: