Signing and Publishing Your Application

Writing and running Android applications for your own amusement is all well and good, but the point of creating new applications is to share them with others, whether you charge money for them or give them away for free. Google has created Android Market just for that purpose. Anyone with a connected Android phone can open the Android Market application and immediately download any of hundreds (soon to be
thousands) of applications expressly designed for Android. These applications range from the very practical (Navigation, Timesheets, File Managers, etc.) to the downright silly (applications that make rude noises for the fun of it). There are a number of steps any application developer will go through in preparing and submitting an application to Android Market:

1. Thoroughly test the application—at least with the Android emulator, but also with as many actual Android devices as you can lay your hands on. There is no substitute for testing applications on real phones under real mobile network conditions to prove that they work as you intend. The last thing you want is thousands of people upset with you because your application doesn’t work the way they expect it to.

2. Decide whether you’d like to add an End User License Agreement (EULA) to your application. This is normal practice in the industry (it’s the “click to accept” license that you see when you download an application, even on desktops), and is strongly advised.

3. Create the icon and label you want displayed for your application in the Application Launcher, and attach them to your application.

4. Clean up the application for release: turn off debugging, get rid of any extraneous print or logging statements that you had in for debug, and take a final look at the code to clean it up.


5. Make sure you’ve included a version number and a version name in your manifest file, and of course, bump the version number if this is a new version of a previously released application.

6. Create a signing certificate, and, if needed, a Map API Key.

7. Recompile your application for release using Android Tools.

8. Sign your application using jarsigner and your signing certificate.

9. Retest your signed application to be sure no errors were entered during the process.