SOP for deploying Reserbiz mobile application to Google Playstore

Overview

Everytime we have a new release of the Reserbiz mobile application, we have to publish a new version of the app on the Google Playstore. The instructions listed below are the steps to do a deployment of the app on the Playstore. The goal here is to first generate a bundle file for the app and then publish the new bundle on the Google Playstore.

Procedures

Deploying the application on Google Playstore consist of two steps. First is, we will going to generate the android bundle file and the second is to deploy this generated android bundle file on the Google Playstore. Please refer to the instructions below.

Generating build file

1. Open Visual studio code and open the Reserbiz workspace.
2. Switch to master branch and make sure it is sync with the origin.
3. Open D:\Projects\ReSerBiz\ReserbizAPP\App_Resources\Android\src\main\AndroidManifest.xml file, and make sure to update both android:versionCode and android:versionName attributes under manifest tag to whatever the latest version of the application that we will going to deploy on Google Playstore. The android:versionCode should be incremented by atleast 1 for every deployment while android:versionName should have the actual relase version of the application.
4. From within the visual studio code, open terminal window and run the cli command below. This will basically navigate to the Reserbiz project directory and build the project on android platform using the production environment settings which is the D:\Projects\ReSerBiz\ReserbizAPP\src\environments\environment.prod.ts.

cd .\ReserbizAPP\
ns build android --env.production

5. After the building process from the visual studio code, now open the Android Studio. Make sure to open the project directory where the android application was built which is normally in D:\Projects\ReSerBiz\ReserbizAPP\platforms\android directory.
6. Still on the Android Studio, we are going to generate the bundle file for the application. Now, on the main menu available on the android studio, go to Build -> Generate Signed Bundle/APK. This will open up a dialog. This dialog consist of several steps for generating bundle file. Follow the steps below:

• Select Android App Bundle option, Click Next.
• On the Key store path field, locate the app key store for the application which is located at D:\Projects\ReSerBiz\ReserbizAPP\reserbiz-app.keystore. Provide the Key store password, Key alias and key password which can be found on Keepass then click Next.
• Leave whatever the default path on the Destination Folder field. Under Build Variants, select release option then click Finish button.
• At this point, the generating of bundle file is on going, it will take some time depending on the size of the application.
• The generated build file can be found on D:\Projects\ReSerBiz\ReserbizAPP\platforms\android\app\build\outputs\bundle\release.

Deploy on Google Playstore

1. At this point, we should now have the app bundle file which we will going to deploy on the Google Playstore.
2. To access the Google Playstore Console, go to https://play.google.com/console/u/0/developers/8245652976829124383/app-list. On this page, you can see the list of all available android applications. From the list, select Reserbiz.
3. From the inside of the selected application, select Production from the sidebar menu. This page contains release-related information of the app. On this page, we are going to create a new release for the app bundle file that we have, to do this, click the Create new release button. This will bring you to the Create production release page.
4. On the Create production release page, particularly on the App bundles section, upload the app bundle file that we generated from the previous steps.
5. Under Release details section, Release name field will be prefilled with the value that we provided on the android:versionName and android:versionCode inside the AndroidManifest.xml file. For Release notes field, we are going to provide some release notes. We can use the release notes that we have on the github repository of the project which can be found here https://github.com/RoiJS/Reserbiz/releases. But only select the features that will be available publicly, skip those internal changes.
6. After uploading the app bundle file and providing the release notes, click the Save button located at the bottom right section of the page.
7. To officially release/deploy the application, click the Review release button.
8. Normally, reviewing of the app will take at least one week before it will be publicly available on the Google Playstore.