Publishing a Flutter android app on the google play store

Release process in brief.

Prerequisite:

1. You have a working Android studio project for an application you are building.
2. The project you have could be a flutter application written in dart or react native application written in JS or a native application written in Java/Kotlin.
3. You have a google play console account.
4. You have 3–4 screenshots of your application.
5. You have a 1024x1024 size icon image using which we will create an icon set for different screen sizes.

Steps at a high level

1. Create the application icons using an icon generator.
2. Create a key pair which will be stored in a key store and that key store will be used to sign the archive before we upload it to the google play store.
3. Setup google play console for a new application.
4. Use the archive in step 1 to upload it on the google play console and wait for google to approve it.

Create the application icons using an icon generator.

1. Get the logo image of 1024x1024 pixels. I generated a simple logo from the canva website.
2. Use the icon generator link to open the website.
3. Upload the logo.
4. Set the right padding and background.
5. Download the image folder.

Gif for a step-by-step guide to generating logo images for different screen resolutions

6. Unzip the folder and you will see logos for different screen sizes.

Icons for android for different screen sizes.

7. Copy and paste the images from the downloaded folder at the exact location inside your android project. Here is the folder structure for my project.

Android resource folder structure.

Create a key pair which will be stored in a key store and that key store will be used to sign the archive before we upload it to the google play store.

1. Follow the steps mentioned in this link to generate upload key pair.
2. Create a key.properties file so that Gradle can read the Keystore generated from the right place and open it. Please follow this link.
3. Configure Gradle so that for release builds it picks up the key.properties file and does the signing. Please follow this link.

Creating Android app bundle (aab)

Please follow this link.

Create an application and upload it on your google play console account

1. Open google play console.
2. Create a new app using create app button.
3. Create a new release and upload the aab generated by the previous step.
4. You can explore the google play console a little bit to get comfortable.

Google play console aab upload process in brief.

More about release philosophy can be read here.

1. Detailed instructions on the flutter website.
2. Google play console instructions.