Instructions for creating a signed, release APK, suitable for the Google Play Store
To make things easier, you should do all these commands in the same terminal, especially the steps 2 and 3 as step 3 depends on the exported variables, and export only affect the current shell (the program that runs in the terminal) session. Step 1 is only needed the first time you do a release, as you'll reuse your keys for subsequent releases, make sure not to erase your ~/keystores directory, or you won't be able to release updates to your app.
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You need to know about the Android APK signing process. If you do not, start by reading the official Sign Your App documentation.
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You need to create the key:
$ mkdir -p ~/keystores/ $ keytool -genkey -v -keystore ~/keystores/<your-new-key>.keystore -alias <your-key-alias> -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000
[ Addition by HeRo002, Feb. 25, 2020:
'keytool' does not like non-English characters in passwords.
'keytool' says: Warning:
The JKS keystore uses a proprietary format. It is recommended to migrate to PKCS12 which is an industry standard format using:
$ keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore ~/keystores/<your-new-key>.keystore -destkeystore ~/keystores/<your-new-key>.keystore -deststoretype pkcs12
But that form of the command only seems to work if the 2 passwords are identical. ]
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Then export some variables:
$ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYSTORE=~/keystores/<your-new-key>.keystore $ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYSTORE_PASSWD=android $ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYALIAS_PASSWD=android $ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYALIAS=<your-key-alias>
[ Addition by HeRo002, Feb. 28, 2020:
NB! Replace line 2 and 3 in the above with this...:
$ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYSTORE_PASSWD="<your-keystore-password>"
$ export P4A_RELEASE_KEYALIAS_PASSWD="<your-key-alias-password>"
PS: It seems that people generally prefer to use 2 identical passwords. ]
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Make release apk (will be signed automatically) using the :
$ cd <your-project-folder> $ buildozer -v android release
[ HeRo002, edited again March 4, 2020:
Experience of mine and others show that the following step 4 corrupts the APK file! You cannot 'zipalign' it AFTER signing it. Simply skip Step 4. You will get a warning in Google Play Console that the APK package is not optimized, but that is not a real problem...
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Optimize it:
$ ~/.buildozer/android/platform/android-sdk-20/build-tools/23.0.1/zipalign -v 4 ./bin/Your-App-0.1-release.apk ./bin/Your-App-0.1-release-optimized.apk
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