Android - Steps for Signing & Making Publish Ready App.

Android - Steps for Signing & Making Publish Ready App.

Following are the steps involved in Signing and making your Android App publish ready. These steps should be followed in the same order as written in this document while Publishing an App to Android Market. Before you move towards the Signing and Publishing Steps; there are few things you have to take care in your App.

• First of all we need to do proper versioning of the App. Versioning is important for the future updates. There are 2 fields in the Application Manifest file that determines the version of the App. First is “android:versionCode”  this represents the number of times the app is being put on the App Store. For first time it is “1”. Second Parameter is “android:versionName ” this is the version that u want users to see. It is a string and can contain major,minor version name. e.g “0.8.5”
• Once versioning is done next thing is to declare minimum, target and maximum API Level in the manifest file. Its good to mention just minimum SDK Level.
• Disable : “Debuggable” & “Allow Clear User Data” in the Manifest File. 
• Disable all the Logs in your app.
• Register for a Maps API Key by sending the MD5 hash of the certificate with which we are going to sign our application. Once we get the Maps Api key then we use it in our application by mentioning this in the mapview layout( if your application is using MapView element). There are 3 steps of generating Maps api key for the application, first is to locate the “keytool” in your JDK, then use it to generate the MD5 hash of the certificate with which you are going to sign ur application. And finally use this MD5 hash to get the maps Api key.
• To take the MD5 finger print hash of the certificate we first have to make sure that the ‘keytool’ is in our windows PATH variable. If not then add the path of the keytool in ur environment variable. The keytool needed for generating the MD5 hash is present in the “bin” directory of ur JDK i.e. the path will be something like this: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\bin
• Once u have added the path of keytool in ur environment variables then open the command promp and use the following command to generate the MD5 hash

keytool –list –alias Appkey –keystore c:\MyKeystore

here the “Appkey” is an example alias for the key present in the example keystore “MyKeystore” located on the ‘C’ Drive

• The above command will ask u for the password of the key and will then generate MD5 hash of the certificate.
• Go to http://code.google.com/android/maps-api-signup.html and enter the MD5 fingerprint of the certificate calculated above and hit the “Generate Api Key” Button and get the Google Maps Api key. Now use it in the xml layout of the MapView.
• Now we can proceed towards signing and publishing.
• You should first Compile the application in Release Mode to get an Unsigned “.apk” package, Sign it using the keystore and then finally Align the package with zipalign.exe.
• The above steps of Release Compile, Signing and Aligning can easily be done using Eclipse Export tools. Moreover it can also Create a KeyStore if u don’t have one.
• Keystore contains the keys being used by you for signing application. The keys can be referenced in the keystore by there Alias.

Note: Keystore can contain number of Keys and each key in the keystore references to a Certificate binded with it. Moreover, both keystore and keys have their own Passwords however its more convenient to use the same password for both keys and keystore.

Papa Reference

http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/preparing.html