Publish a Cordova Generated Android App to the Google Play Store

Release your app for the world to find and use

This article assumes that you already have a Cordova project setup and can successfully generate an APK file. If that is not true, take a look here to learn more about using Cordova with the Quasar Framework.

First, let’s clean up a few things in order to ensure a proper build (make sure you’re inside a Cordova directory):

$ cordova platform remove android

Details

Open the config.xml and package.json files and update the project details such as name, description, author, etc. Specifically, we need to update the widget id in config.xml. It serves as a unique identifier across all Play Store apps. If you don’t do this, you will get an error when you try to upload the APK file.

The standard convention is to use the reverse domain of your website + the project name. So if my domain is “example.com” and my project is “AndroidApp” the widget id would be “com.example.androidapp”.

# config.xml
<widget id="com.example.androidapp"> # user your own domain
...

Icon

Open config.xml in your text editor and add a tag for the icon. You can use a generic icon that will be applied to all platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, etc.) or you can specify an icon for Android only.

# config.xml
<widget>
...
  <icon src="/path/to/generic/icon" /> # generic icon
  <platform name="android">
    <icon src="/path/to/android/icon" /> # android specific icon
  </platform
...
</widget>

Versioning

Every time you want to upload a new copy to the Play Store you must increment the widget version in config.xml. Make sure you do this before building the release APK you intend to upload to the Play Store. If you don’t, it will throw an error that the version is already in use.

# config.xml
<widget version="1.0.1">
...

Generate API File

Once we have all the details ironed out, we can re-add Android back to the platforms:

$ cordova platform add android

Then we want to build a fresh APK file for release:

$ cordova build --release

Uploading to the Play Store

If you noticed, the file that is generated from cordova build is called app-release-unsigned.apk . The “unsigned” part is what we need to address.

Google requires that your APK file be digitally signed with a certificate. This is how they verify that you are authorized to update the app.

Google Play App Signing

Since this is a new app we are going to take advantage of Google’s signing service which you can read about here. If you have ever signed an app before, the process isn’t different on our end, but now we are better protected in case we lose our key.

Cordova supposedly has a quicker, built-in way of building an app and signing it at the same time (described here), however I was never able to get it to work. So we’ll go with my less preferred way that works. But if you do happen to figure this out, please let me know.

We can now use tools that are included in the JDK installation. First, create a keystore where your keys will be, well, stored. The alias should reflect the name of your app.

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore android.keystore -alias 
android-app-key -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

It will then prompt you for a password for the keystore and some other details. Then it will ask for a password for the individual key. Naturally, these should not be the same.

In the past, if you were to lose this key it would be impossible to update your app. Since we will be using the Google Play App Signing, it’s not detrimental if it get’s lost, but you should still keep it safe.

Remember the keystore name and the alias name. You will need those later.

Now we need to sign the APK we created earlier with the key we just created.

$ jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore android.keystore app-release-unsigned.apk android-app-key

It will ask you for the passwords and then sign the APK, but it will not rename or create a new file so don’t go looking for anything. We need to optimize the APK file with the zipalign tool and also rename it to reflect the signing.

# if zipalign is not installed
$ sudo apt install zipalign
$ zipalign -v 4 app-release-unsigned.apk app-release.apk

There you have it. app-release.apk is the final product.

Google Play Store Console

From here you will need to create a new Play Store developer account (which costs $25). After doing this you can create a new application.

I’m not going to walk you through this because it’s fairly self explanatory. Fill in the fields and answer all their questions. It’s more tedious than it is difficult.

You will manage your releases under the ‘App releases’ section. Clicking through to ‘Create Release’ you will now be able to upload the app-release.apk file we created. The error messages are helpful if you did anything wrong, but that means you will need to make the appropriate changes and then re-run jarsigner and zipalign.

Once you’ve submitted your application, it will be listed as pending until someone from the Play Store approves the details.

After approval, the easy part is done. That’s right, everything up to now has only been preparation. Now you have to get people to actually use the app.