By now, you should be familiar with how to build graphical user interfaces for applications using the Go language. The last step of any journey in building a graphical application is distribution. The process of packaging and releasing your completed product can be challenging, especially if you are publishing to multiple platforms, and we will explore these details in this chapter.

While the Go language and the libraries that we've utilized so far in this book make it easy to write software for multiple platforms, there is no escaping the fact that different operating systems require native graphical applications to be in different formats. For developers, it is often easy to forget this, as Go tools build from the source code in a way that's consistent across different systems. To prepare an application for release, we will look at the following topics:

• Preparing metadata and icons for our application
• Bundling assets to fit with Go's single binary distribution
• Packaging a completed application for different operating systems
• Uploading to platform marketplaces and app stores

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to package and distribute graphical applications ready to share with your target audience. You'll have worked through the steps to create application packages that can be downloaded or installed exactly as users on each of your distribution platforms expect. We start by gathering all of the information that you will need to complete a distribution for any system marketplace.