Once you have catered for the necessary steps prior to this, you are ready to publish your application to the production channel of the Play Store. Firstly, you will need to roll out a release. A release allows you to upload the APK files of your application and roll out your application to a specific track. At the end of the release procedure, you can publish your application by clicking Confirm rollout.
So, that was all we need to know to publish a new application on the Play Store. In most cases, you will not need to follow all these steps in a linear manner, you will just need to follow a subset of the steps—more specifically, those pertaining to the type of application you wish to publish. As always, the best way to understand a set of steps is through an example. Let's go ahead and publish an application we developed in a previous chapter. We will publish the Messenger application to the Play Store in the following section. You may choose to publish any of the applications we previously developed if you prefer.
The first thing we will do in order to publish the Messenger app to the Play Store is create a Google Play Developer Account. Doing this is simple. We will show you how in the following paragraphs. First and foremost, choose your favorite web browser and navigate to the following URL: https://play.google.com/apps/publish/signup .
Once you open the web page, you will be asked to sign in with your Google account. After signing in with an appropriate Google account, you will be required to accept the developer program agreement. This second step is shown in the following screenshot:
Accept the Google Play Developer agreement by scrolling to the bottom of the web page, as shown in the following screenshot, and ticking I agree and I am willing to associate my account registration with the Google Play Developer distribution agreement:
After accepting the agreement, click CONTINUE TO PAYMENT to proceed with your developer account creation. You are required to pay a one-time Google Play Developer Account registration fee of $25. You will be taken through a hassle-free payment process. Once payment has been successfully made, you will be prompted accordingly:
Clicking CONTINUE REGISTRATION will take you to the final step of the registration process where you will be asked to complete your account details, as follows:
Enter the rest of your account details as required and click COMPLETE REGISTRATION to finish the account registration process.
Upon completing registration, you will be directed to the Google Play Developer Console. From here, you can manage your applications, use Google Play game services, manage your orders, download application reports, view alerts, and manage your console settings:
We are interested in publishing an Android application. As such, click PUBLISH AN ANDROID APP ON GOOGLE PLAY on the console dashboard. Select a default language and input Messenger as the app's title when requested to then click CREATE. A new draft application will be created for you on the Developer console:
Before proceeding with our application publication process, we must sign a release APK for the Messenger app.