Publish to the Google Play Store

You just finished developing a visually appealing and fully functional Android App, and now you are ready to share your creation with the world!

Soon it will reside not only on your Android device, but on the devices of people around the globe. It’s an exciting step! Isn’t it?

Myself Bhavna Thacker. Welcome to Publishing to the Play Store course.

In this course, you will learn how to: prepare your app for Release. What’s new in Google Play Console. Learn how to Create a Store listing. How to Build a release ready Bundle.

Learn about different testing tracks and how to create a test as well as production release. Learn about recent Google play policy updates. Also learn about different types of rejections in google play and how to handle each of them.

Please note that in June 2020, Google introduced the new Google Play Console UI. Also there are several key google play policy enforcements in 2021 and some planned for 2022. So it will be very exciting as well as important to learn these!

To upload an app to the Google Play Store, you will need several things like: a google account. 25 dollars fee for Google Play Developer account, this is one time fee. Android Studio to build the release ready Bundle. A feature graphic and a high res icon that will appear on the play store.

A physical device - It is not required but Recommended. You may test your app on an emulator but official developer documentation recommends that you should thoroughly test the release version on at least one target handset device and one target tablet device.

In order to upload an app to Google Play Store, you need an access to Google Play Console.

To access Google Play Console, you need to have a Google Play Developer account.

So, the Overall process to Upload an App to Play store is as follows:

First, you will need to create a google play developer account if you don’t already have one. You must be at least 18 years of age to sign up for a Google Play Developer account.

Second, you need to create a release ready App Bundle using Android Studio.

Third, you will have to create a store listing which includes the title, short as well long description, feature graphic, screenshots etc.

And finally you will upload your bundle for Testing in Google play, post which you will release it to end users.

At a broad level, When you publish an Android application, you perform two main tasks:

First, You prepare the application for release. Here you configure, build and Test your app in release mode. Please note that as a developer, you quite often test your app in debug mode during development, but testing the app in release mode is also a crucial step.

During the release step you publicize, sell, and distribute the release version of your application to users.

In the next episode, you will learn how to prepare your app for release. So stay tuned!