Introduction

Welcome to this series on "How to upload your very first android app on playstore".

To publish your app on playstore, you must first have a developer account.

I strongly recommend each and every android developer to have a developer account of their own.

It is very affordable and easy to maintain.

The only condition is that you must be at least 18 years of age and then you can sign up to your developer account using your google account.

You need to pay $25 USD only (1,877 INR approx), which is a one-time registration fee, after which, you can use your developer account and publish unlimited number of apps for a lifetime.

You can pay the amount using the following credit or debit cards:

• MasterCard
• Visa
• American Express
• Discover (U.S. only)
• Visa Electron (Outside of the U.S. only)

After entering your account details and accepting all terms and conditions you are now ready to publish your first app on playstore.

You will get most of this information on google developer support.

But my main motive in writing this post is to encourage android developers to create a developer account and publish atleast one app of their own on playstore.

If you need any help on the topic, feel free to contact me.

Your first app need not be great, it can be a very simple one.

This was my first app on playstore:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sneha.vtusgpaandcgpacalculator

This app is a very basic app that calculates the SGPA, CGPA and percentage for the students of Visvesvaraya Technological University.

The first version of my app could only calculate the results and had many issues with the layout.

Also, I didn't know how to debug the errors till the first two updates of my app and I faced alot of problems because of that. I used to rewrite my code completely each time I got errors and could not identify them easily.

Neither did I have any training in android, nor did I have a single go to person for the problems I faced in the beginning.

I was dependent solely on YouTube videos and online materials and used my very basic knowledge of java and oops concept in writing the programs.

In the second update, I changed all my xml files.
I studied about the different layouts and then shifted from linear layout to constraint layout for better compatibility with all screen sizes.

Next, I got to know about fragments, splash screens, introsliders, bottom navigation bar, drawer navigation, etc so I added them as well to my app.

I also added toasts, text watchers, etc.

Then, I thought of saving the calculations for future reference, and used SQLite for it.
(So that I could save the calculations in the phone itself for easy and free offline access.)

Gradually , I added admob and firebase integrations as well in it.

Now after you have made your first app and you think you are ready to publish it, you'll also have to decide how to build it, as an apk file or as an app bundle, I will be talking about that in the next post in this series.

After building your app, you have to choose how to release the app, between alpha or beta testing on the developer console or full production.
In the third post in this series, I will be talking about these three options in detail.

In the fourth and last post in this series, I will conclude by talking about making future updates in your app.