Publishing Your Game - Beginning Android Games - page 654

both free and paid apps depends on which country you live in. To post paid apps, you must live
in one of the countries on Google's somewhat shorter list of supported locations for merchants.
Google also has separate lists of countries to which you can distribute apps freely and countries
to which you can distribute paid apps. Google is working hard to expand these lists so that your
apps can reach the entire globe.

Your Google Play Store publisher account is tied directly to a Google account. Unless
restrictions have been lifted, you may not separate the publisher account from the Google
account. It's important to take that into account when deciding between registering with an
existing account or registering with a new, dedicated account. Once you've made that decision
and have your Google account ready, visit https://play.google.com/apps/publish/signup and
follow the instructions given there to register for the Google Play store.

In addition to your Android developer account, you will also need to register for a free Google
Checkout merchant account if you want to sell your applications. You will have the option to
do this during the developer account sign-up process. We're not lawyers, so we can't give you
any legal advice at this point, but make sure you understand the legal implications of selling an
application before you do so. If in doubt, consider consulting an expert on the matter. We don't
mean to scare you off by this, as the process is pretty streamlined in general, but you should be
prepared to keep your government's tax department apprised about your sales activity.

Google will take a percentage of your hard-earned money (30% as of this writing) for distributing
your app and providing the infrastructure. That seems to be pretty much the standard cut taken
by all the application stores on the various platforms.

Signing Your Game's APK
After you have successfully registered as an official Android developer, it's time to prepare your
application for publication to Google Play. In order to publish your application, you have to sign
the APK file. Before you do that, you should make sure everything is in place. Here's a laundry
list of things to do before signing the APK file:

android:debuggable attribute from the <application> tag in
your manifest file or set it to "false" .
In the

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<manifest> tag, you'll find the android:versionCode and
android:versionName attributes. If you have already published a previous
version of your application, you must increase the versionCode attribute, and
you should also change the versionName attribute. The versionCode attribute
has to be an integer; the versionName attribute can be anything you like.
If your build target is equal to or higher than SDK level 8 (Android 2.2), you

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should also make sure the <manifest> tag has the android:installLocation
attribute set to preferExternal or auto . This will satisfy your users by
ensuring that your application is installed on external storage if possible.

ï?® Make sure you only specify the permissions that your game really needs.

Users don't like to install applications that seem to demand unnecessary
permissions. Check the <uses-permission> tags in your manifest file.