Register app on Google Play console
Part II - Publishing app manually to Google Play store | Story 1 - Registering app on Google Play console
In Part-I of this series, we initialized a new React-Native app using RN CLI, renamed its BundleID/Package Name as per our requirements, added app icons, changed the default versioning for iOS/Android versions of the app to use semantic versioning and finally also configured it to allow us to develop the app using Typescript.
Now, in this Part-II of the series, we will see how to register our app on Google play console and manually publish the first version of the app to Play store.
Google/Android requires that the first APK or App Bundle(AAB) of an app needs to be configured and published via the Google Play Console because registering the app with the Play Store cannot be automated using the Play Developer API. For all subsequent uploads and changes, utilities like Gradle Play Publisher(GPP) may be used.
Thus, we will release/publish our app’s first AAB file to play store manually via the Google Play Console. If you’ve already published your app manually from Google Play console and only looking to see how to automate subsequent bundling and uploads, you can jump to Part III - Automating app’s Android package bundling and publishing using GPP.
Sign up for Google Developer account
In order to publish it to Google Play store, you need to have a Google Developer account.
Sign up for a Google Developer account if you don’t have it already.
Create application in Google Play Developer Account
⊙ Sign In to your Google Play Developer’s console.
⊙ Select All applications → Create application.👇
⊙ In the following pop-up form, select a default language and add a title for your app as you would want it to appear on Google Play.
⊙ Click ‘CREATE’ button 👇
Google Play console would create the app & take you to its Store Listing page
Here under the Store Listing, we would have to enter following details related to our app’s store listing:
▪ Product Details
▪ Graphic Assets
▪ Categorization
▪ Contact details
PRODUCT DETAILS
In this section, as shown in the below screen-shot 👇, enter a Short description and Full description for your app that will appear on the app’s listing page on Google Play store.
GRAPHIC ASSETS
In this section, we can add/upload icon file and screenshots for the app’s store listing.
Add the app’s screenshot files, Hi-res icon (512 x 512 png) that we created and downloaded in the Part 1 of the series 👇.
Note, you would also need an image of ratio 1024 w x 500h for feature graphic. I used https://resizeimage.net/ to resize our app icon to 1024 x 500 size.
CATEGORIZATION
In this section, select Application type and its category.
Leave the ‘Content Rating’ part for now, we’ll have to upload our apk/aab file first to complete the ‘Content Rating’ form.
CONTACT DETAILS
Enter the developer’s contact details 👇
Click on Save Draft button.
Go back to Google Play Developer Console home page and you should see the above created application listed in Draft status
Creating Privacy Policy page for the app
We got the application created in Google Play console. Now next step would be to configure a release for our application on the console. During this configuration, we would be asked to enter a url for the app’s Privacy Policy url.
If you are part of some organization/corporate, its legal division may help you with the contents and probably even a URL for the app’s Privacy Policy and other terms &.conditions.
However for individual or hobby developers, a quick and easy way would be to setup a Google site and add a page with some standard Privacy Policy contents.
Create Privacy Policy content
I used this free online tool to generate the privacy policy content page for the app 👇
Next we will use Google Sites to quickly generate a page for us with the privacy policy content we generated and copied above.
📌 🅝🅞🅣🅔 : App’s Privacy Policy URLCool, we got the app created/registered on Google Play console and completed its store listing details. Also we created a website page listing Privacy Policy for our app.
In the next post, we will create our react-native app’s Android build to get its .aab file to publish in Google Play console.
