Learning React Native

Chapter 11. Deploying Android Applications

All right! You’ve made it this far; ready to deploy your Android app and get it into your users’ hands? If you’ve already gone through the iOS app submission process, plenty here will feel familiar, though happily the Play Store approval process is simpler. Review is faster, too: you can expect it to take 1–2 business days for your application to be approved.

In this chapter, we’ll cover what you’ll need to do to generate a deploy-ready APK of your React Native application, how to distribute it to your beta testers, and how to submit it to the Google Play Store for review.

Check the Docs!

We’ll be doing a detailed walkthrough of how to deploy your Android application here, but you’ll always want to consult the official documentation for the most up-to-date procedures.

Setting Application Icon

While the default Android icon is kinda cute, you’ll want to replace it with a custom application icon before you deploy your application.

The application icon is specified in android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml:

android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"

That filepath refers to a path within android/app/src/main/res/. You may recall from Chapter 3 that Android image resources are located in different folders based on their resolution. The icon file is no different. You’ll notice that the default icon is already present in your application (Figure 11-1).

Figure 11-1. File structure for the application icon files

You can just replace these files ...