Publishing Your Cordova App to the Play Store

You’re done! Now you want to publish? There’s a great resource here: http://ionicframework.com/docs/guide/publishing.html

But I’ll repost the instructions here, in case the page goes away.

First you need to build for release:

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

cordova build --release android

[/pastacode]

If you have a keystore file already you can skip the next part. Basically, google requires you to sign the app, they will use this public key to verify you on your updates, so make sure you keep the .keystore file around:

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-release-key.keystore -alias alias_name -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

[/pastacode]

Next you need to sign it with the keystore file:

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore my-release-key.keystore HelloWorld-release-unsigned.apk alias_name

[/pastacode]

Now to the only trick part of this…

You need to “zipalign” your file:

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

zipalign -v 4 HelloWorld-release-unsigned.apk HelloWorld.apk

[/pastacode]

Just make sure you have access to the zipalign executable from your terminal, if you don’t you could do something like this:

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/23.0.0/zipalign -v 4 HelloWorld-release-unsigned.apk HelloWorld.apk

[/pastacode]

If you’re on a Mac that should work. Now go to the play store console: https://play.google.com/apps/publish/

You need to pay $25 to get into their developer program, once you’ve done it, you should be able to create a new app and upload your apk that you generated above.