Setting up your Flutter app for publishing in Play Store.

Published in

vijaycreations

4 min readAug 22, 2020

Before publishing our Flutter app in Google Play Store we need to brush up few feature to make sure that the app is entirely done and eligible for release.🚀 In this article we shall be discussing those features that we need to focus before publishing the app.

App Launcher Icon

Once the functionality and the UI/UX part is done. we need to set up an icon for our app. Setting up a decent good looking app icon is very important.

In the below mentioned article we have already discussed step by step procedure about setting up a launcher icons for flutter app 👇:
https://medium.com/@_Vijay_/change-app-launcher-icons-flutter-b6e4c93b1a39 (both written and video tutorial is available).

Signing the app

After finishing setting up an icon, we need to create a digital signature for our app. This signature is then used for accessing our app for publishing further versions.

Creating a keystore

For Mac/Linux use the following command to generate a key.,

keytool -genkey -v -keystore ~/key.jks -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 -alias key

For Windows use the following command to generate a key.,

keytool -genkey -v -keystore c:\Users\USER_NAME\key.jks -storetype JKS -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 -alias key

Once you run the above command, It will ask for few details such as the key password, store password and few others.
Once it is done a file named key.jks will be created in the location mentioned above. In our case it is… c:\Users\USER_NAME

Store this key file (key.jks) in a secure place because the same key file will be used for signing the app in play store during further release updates.
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Reference to KeyStore

Create a file named key.properties in the android directory of your app.
This file must contain the reference to the keystore generated in the previous step.

storePassword=<password from previous step>
keyPassword=<password from previous step>
keyAlias=key
storeFile=<location of the key store file, such as /Users/<user name>/key.jks>

Replace the storePassword , keyPassword , storeFile with the desired password and file location provided during the above process.

Setting up Gradle

Change the build.gradle file available in android/app/build.gradle with the following keystore information.

def keystoreProperties = new Properties()
   def keystorePropertiesFile = rootProject.file('key.properties')
   if (keystorePropertiesFile.exists()) {
       keystoreProperties.load(new FileInputStream(keystorePropertiesFile))
   }android {
         ...
   }

Add the above bold text before the android block in your build.gradle file.

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Similarly add the following code before the buildTypes block in your build.gradle file.

signingConfigs {
       release {
           keyAlias keystoreProperties['keyAlias']
           keyPassword keystoreProperties['keyPassword']
           storeFile keystoreProperties['storeFile'] ? file(keystoreProperties['storeFile']) : null
           storePassword keystoreProperties['storePassword']
       }
   }
   buildTypes {
       release {
           signingConfig signingConfigs.release
       }
   }

Note: Don’t forget to change the signingConfigs as release in buildTypes block.

Reviewing the appId and VerionNo

We have now almost completed setting up ✨ our app for release. Now it’s time to check the app id (app name) and the version number before proceeding further.

The below article guides you how to change the app name and version number in detail 👇:
https://medium.com/@_Vijay_/changing-app-name-and-version-number-in-flutter-5eb5cd8ed2f3

Building the app for release

For publishing the app in Play Store, it is preferred to generate app bundle instead of generating apk files.

Generating app bundle.

Run the following command for generating an app bundle.

flutter build appbundle

The generated app bundle will be available in the following location.,
<app dir>/build/app/outputs/bundle/release/app.aab.

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We can also generate the apk files by running the below command.

flutter build apk --split-per-abi

The above command will result in three separate apk’s and they will be available at the below locations as follows.

<app dir>/build/app/outputs/apk/release/app-armeabi-v7a-release.apk
<app dir>/build/app/outputs/apk/release/app-arm64-v8a-release.apk
<app dir>/build/app/outputs/apk/release/app-x86_64-release.apk

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And that’s it from the coding side. 👩‍💻

💡 Suggestion:
Before uploading your app bundle or apk in play store I recommend you to test the app by generating an apk and run it in a physical device. Just to make sure that the app runs smoothly as expected. Because debug is different from release. We may not have encountered few error as we might be running our app in debug mode.
You can also skip this step if you are confident enough about your code.

For generating an apk use the command.,