Deploying to an Android device is a fairly straightforward process. If you have a working Android development environment, you’re ready to go.

Requirements

Running Your App

To run your app, all you have to do is enable USB debugging and Developer Mode on your Android device, then runionic cordova run android --devicefrom the command line.

This will produce a debug build of your app, both in terms of Android and Ionic’s code

Enabling USB debugging and Developer Mode can vary between devices, but is easy to look up with a Google search. You can also check outEnabling On-device Developer Optionsin the Android docs.

Production Builds

To run or build your app for production, run

$ ionic cordova run android --prod --release

# or

$ ionic cordova build android --prod --release

This will minify your app’s code as Ionic’s source and also remove any debugging capabilities from the APK. This is generally used when deploying an app to the Google Play Store.

Sign Android APK

If you want to release your app in the Google Play Store, you have to sign your APK file. To do this, you have to create a new certificate/keystore.

Let’s generate your private key using the keytool command that comes with the JDK:

keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-release-key .jks -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048  -validity 10000 -alias my-alias

You’ll first be prompted to create a password for the keystore. Then, answer the rest of the nice tools’s questions and when it’s all done, you should have a file called my-release-key.jks created in the current directory.

Note: Make sure to save this file somewhere safe, if you lose it you won’t be able to submit updates to your app!

To sign the unsigned APK, run the jarsigner tool which is also included in the JDK:

jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore my-release-key .jks android-release-unsigned .apk my-alias

This signs the APK in place. Finally, we need to run the zip align tool to optimize the APK. The zipalign tool can be found in/path/to/Android/sdk/build-tools/VERSION/zipalign. For example, on OS X with Android Studio installed, zipalign is in~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/VERSION/zipalign:

zipalign -v 4 android-release-unsigned.apk HelloWorld.apk

To verify that your apk is signed run apksigner. The apksigner can be also found in the same path as the zipalign tool:

apksigner verify HelloWorld.apk

Now we have our final release binary called HelloWorld.apk and we can release this on the Google Play Store for all the world to enjoy!

All steps can also be found here: Android SDK docs

results matching ""

    No results matching ""