Releasing to the Android store

Creating an Android app is getting easier and easier with the tooling advancing almost as fast as the SDKs.

Once you are ready to release the app, however, you soon realise there’s Publishing to the Google App Store is not quite as fun as you’d hope, especially the first time round. Once you’ve paid up, produced your images, agreed to T&Cs, edited descriptions and all the (many) checkpoints detailed in “preparing for release”:http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/preparing.html, actually releasing or updating is fairly straightforward though.

Up and running

As you’d probably expect from Google, the analytics available are excellent, breaking down usage by all sorts of parameters, for you to slice & dice as you see fit. More useful for a paid app, no doubt.

A word of warning

As I found out in slow-motion horror when first producing a bugfix version, never, ever lose your keystore key. This will hurt you hard.

Luckily (kinda…), as it happens the keystore is hackable. That saved the day last year, but suffice to say passwords have been securely stored. On which note, LastPass is really helping managed the modern nightmare of logins nowadays…