Create an Android Release Build with EAS and Upload to Google Play Store

[00:00] To publish apps on the Play Store you will need a paid Google Play developer account. If the app you are building is for a client then this should be their Google Play account, and you should ask them to create one. You always better off choosing an organization account if you can. Especially if you intend to monetize your app. For 1, your full legal address has to be [00:20] shown on a play store page for paying apps. Additionally, as of November 2023, personal accounts also have additional testing requirements. You need 20 testers to test your app for at least 14 days before you can even apply for production access. However, if this is a personal project and you're not planning on monetizing it, or you simply aren't able to [00:40] create an organization account, an individual account will work just fine. To create your account you'll have to pay a one off registration fee. And before you can start setting up your app, you'll need to provide documentation to verify your identity and address. Google have a manual process to review these and it took about a week in my case. [01:00] Once everything is paid for submitted and approved, go to your Google Play console and click on home. From here click on create app. I'm going to name mine plants, colon watering reminders, same as on the app store. Again choose your default language. Choose whether it's an app or a game, and whether [01:20] it's free or paid. Now there's quite a few declarations for you to read and review. Once that's done you can create the app. You can pretty much use this dashboard as a to do list of everything you need to do in order to release your app all the way to production. Internal testing is for distributing the app on your own device or to a small group [01:40] of trusted users. Let's click on view tasks to see what we need to do to make this happen. We start off by selecting testers, and we'll need to create an email list. I'm going to call mine plants internal testers, and I'll add my own email to the list to give myself access. Note this needs to be the same email you'd use to log in to Google Play. [02:00] And now we click save changes, create, and save. Now let's go to the releases page and create a new release. For the production build we'll want to use the production build profile from our EAS JSON. Now open the terminal and type EAS build platform Android. [02:21] We don't need to add the profile production because it's already the default. And now we wait for the build to finish. Once our build is done we want to head back to the Google Play console and under releases choose create a new release. The very first time you create a build you need to set up build signing. So let's choose [02:40] signing key, and let's use the Google generated key. It is possible to manage your key store yourself, and a lot of older apps created before Google added this functionality will still do that, but it's quite dangerous to manage your own because if you lose your key store or the credentials to your key store, you won't be able to publish any new app builds. So this is a whole lot [03:00] safer. Now go to EAS and open the Android Play Store build you created, And click on download to download the app bundle. Notice that our staging and development build created an apk whereas the production build creates an app bundle. Apks are directly installable on a device [03:20] whereas app bundles must be uploaded to Google Play. On the Google Play console, scroll down to app bundles and click on upload and choose the app bundle. Once your bundle is downloaded, scroll down. Note that the release notes will be available for your end users whereas the release name is internal to you. The default [03:40] release name that's prefilled consists of the build number and the app version. I usually keep the default name because it's handy to know what build number and app version we're up to. But you can always add additional notes after the name. For example, I'll call this initial build. Now that we're done, let's hit next. [04:02] And save. Now until your apps gone through closed testing it will have a temporary name. It will only be used for your internal testing group. Now click on the testers tab and scroll down to where you have this copy link button. This is the URL you can share with your internal testers so they can open the app. [04:22] For sharing your app with end users, you can either send them the link directly or sometimes it can be handy to create a QR code. I'm using this free QR code generator to do that. And open the camera app on my phone and scan the QR code. Remember, you have [04:42] to be logged in with the Google account that was added to the internal testing group. I'll select continue And I'll see the invite which I will accept. And download the app on Google Play. Now because I've been using the same phone throughout and we've used the same app ID [05:02] for all the builds, This detects that I already have an app with this app ID installed. So for the sake of this demo I will uninstall it and install it from the play store. Small tangent for me apparently I need to verify my age. So now I've verified that I'm old enough. I will install again, and you will download the build from Google Play. [05:22] And we have our production app installed.