Building Your App for Release

All APKs must be digitally signed with a certificate before they can be installed. To sign your release build, you can either:

(1) Use Android Studio to manually generated signed APKs, either one at a time or for multiple variants at once. Detailed steps to manually sign your release build here.

or

(2) Configure your Gradle build settings to handle signing automatically during the build process. Detailed steps to Configure the build process to automatically sign your APK here.

Secure your private key!!!

Keep your keystore (with private key) in a SAFE and SECURE place, and ensure that you have secure backups of them. If you publish an app to Google Play and then lose the key with which you signed your app, you will not be able to publish any updates to your app, since you must always sign all versions of your app with the same key. Don't end up as one of these unhappy developers.