Building and publishing an app for Android

Building and publishing an Android app is a little more straightforward than iOS because you just interface with the command line to build the .apk file and upload it to Google Play's Developer Console.

The Ionic Framework documentation also has a great instruction page for this, which is http://ionicframework.com/docs/guide/publishing.html.

Getting ready

The requirement is to have your Google Developer account ready and to log in to https://play.google.com/apps/publish.

Your local environment should also have the right SDK as well as keytool, jarsigner, and zipalign command line for that specific version.

How to do it…

Here are the instructions:

1. Go to your app folder and build for Android with the following command:

   $ ionic package build --release android
   

2. You will see the android-release-unsigned.apk in the /platforms/android/build/outputs/apk folder. Go to that folder in the terminal:

   

3. If this is the first time you created this app, you must have a keystore...