Publishing an Android App

I’ve written previously about my toying around this summer with some simple code to create a job title generator and my learning to create an android app out of it. A friend of mine asked what it would take to publish the app and make money off of it. My snarky response was, “People willing to buy it.” He encouraged me to put it up on the Google Play store and I recently did that. I figured I’d write a little bit about the process of getting the app ready and the publishing process.

One of the nice points of publishing an app to the Google Play store is the low cost of getting started. To put an app on the Google Play store there is a one-time fee of $25 to create the developer account. By comparison, the Apple iOS Developer program costs $99 per year. This may help to improve the quality of the apps in the Apple Store. However, for me, that’s more money than I’m willing to part with for a whim of an app that may never make a single sale. So, thankfully, I’m an Android guy. It’s also worth mentioning that if an app is put up for sale on the Google Play Store (as opposed to being a free download), Google will take 70% of the price of any sales for their commission.

The Android Developer site has a lot of really useful information and articles on the publishing process, including a very helpful checklist. It includes important information about the creation of the developer account, policies related to publishing an app, creating a certificate to sign your apps (and the security ramifications of that certificate), targeting the app to the various versions of Android, testing the app and other important aspects to releasing an app to the public.

Graphics are items that are needed in the publishing process that I didn’t have to think about while “playing around” with the development. Since I’m a code monkey and not a graphics designer, it was probably the most difficult part of the process to complete. The first set of graphics needed are the launch icons. These are the icons that are displayed on the home screen before entering the app itself. I created a simple icon with the initials of the app (JTG). There are multiple icon sizes for the various screen sizes that are available on Android devices. I could have manually created the five icons (plus another for the Play Store), but I found a website that did the work for me very nicely.

There are other graphics required for publishing to the Google Play Store. Two screenshots of the actual app are needed. Those were easy enough to take with my Samsung Galaxy S5. The last required graphic is a “feature” graphic. It’s the graphic that appears at the top of the app’s page in the Play Store. When I wrote my first post about the job title generator I borrowed an image from Flicker that is a word art of some job titles. I took this idea and created my own graphic with some basic fanciness to it using Gimp. That graphic is at the top of this posting.

After finalizing the app, signing it with a certificate of my own, and getting the various graphics ready it was time to publish the app. It is currently up on the Google Play Store. It’s not fancy, it has no ads, I don’t make a grab for all of your personal information, I don’t even collect usage data on the app’s use. Some would say that’s not how you should publish app and that I should collect every little data point I can. I’m not, it’s purpose is to be a simple, yet functional fun little app.