Preparing to publish
You probably don't want to upload any of the apps from this book, so the first step is to develop an app that you want to publish.
Head over to https://play.google.com/apps/publish/ and follow the instructions to get a Google Play developer account. This was $25 at the time of writing and is a one-time charge with no limit on the number of apps you can publish.
Creating an app icon
Exactly how to design an icon is beyond the remit of this book. But, simply put, you need to create a nice image for each of the Android screen density categorizations.
This is easier than it sounds. Design one nice app icon in your favorite drawing program and save it as a .png
file. Then, visit http://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-launcher.html. This will turn your single icon into a complete set of icons for every single screen density.
Tip
Warning! The trade-off for using this service is that the website will collect your e-mail address for their own marketing purposes...