Publishing Android applications - Part 4

In our previous tutorials, we have walked through on how to setup the android environment and also trying out a sample application.

Here is the detailed documentation on how to publish already developed application:
http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/publishing.html

Before we move on for publishing the application, there are few things we need to do:
 testing. testing:
Make sure you test your application on emulator thoroughly and then on the real device.
this article lists out some keyboard shortcuts to change the orientation of the device. This will help
test your application in different orientation. Creating virtual devices of different sizes and testing the application
on them will help find any presentation issues with your application.

Performance and SDK compatibility: make sure your application performs as expected and
there are no bottleneck in the speed. Apart from this, try to develop the application for older SDK versions
so that it can run on most of the Android devices. e.g. SDK 2.1 is currently installed on almost 50% of Android devices.
If you develop on later versions then your application will not be compatible and hence will not be installed on these many devices.

 

Getting ready for the publishing...

1. give required permissions to your application

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>

2. choose right icon and name of the application

<application android:label="@string/my_app_name" android:icon="@drawable/my_icon">

3. increment version number in manifest file
...package="com.example" android:versionCode="1"
android:versionName="1.0"...

note that on every update, you need to increment the value of versionCode where as
versionName is your choosen name  of the version.

4. SDK compatibility

make sure you set right values for android:minSdkVersion, android:targetSdkVersion and android:maxSdkVersion attributes.

5. export and sign your application and generate .apk file

go to File > Export

click on "Export Android Application"

now fill in all the options and generate the .apk file. make sure you store the .key file for later application update.

now navigate to http://market.android.com/publish and upload the application.