Packaging your app

In this first part of the tutorial you will learn how to create an Android App Bundle (AAB) for an application. For new apps Google Play requires the upload of applications as AABs.

We use KTrip as example.

Packaging the application for Google Play

The CI/CD system already creates APKs for KTrip that can be published on F-Droid or separately, but to publish KTrip on Google Play we need to create an Android App Bundle.

To achieve this, we add the template /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-appbundle.yml to the .gitlab-ci.yml file in the 24.02 release branch of KTrip:

include:
  - project: sysadmin/ci-utilities
    file:
      - /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-apks.yml
      - /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-appbundle.yml

This template adds three jobs to the CI/CD pipeline of KTrip:

• craft_android_appbundle_qt66 which creates an AAB of KTrip.
• googleplay_aab_qt66 which publishes the AAB as beta release of KTrip on Google Play.
• sign_aab_qt66 which signs the AAB so that it can be uploaded manually to Google Play. This job does not run automatically.

The last two jobs are only added for pipelines on mainline branches of mainline repositories. In particular, you won't see them in a merge request pipeline.

After successfully running a CI/CD pipeline for the 24.02 branch of KTrip, the craft_android_appbundle_qt66 job will have created an AAB that we can download by browsing the job artifacts. The googleplay_aab_qt66 job will have logged

Branch 'release/24.02' of project 'utilities/ktrip' is not cleared for publishing. Skipping.

We will change this later.

The sign_aab_qt66 job has not run. That's okay. We will run it later.

Signing the Android App Bundle

To prepare Google Play for the publication of KTrip we need to upload one AAB manually as we will see in the next section. This AAB needs to be signed with KDE's upload key so that Google Play accepts it.

We will now configure our CI/CD system, so that it allows signing the AAB created by the CI/CD pipeline. We want to sign the AAB created for the 24.02 release branch. Project branches are cleared for AAB signing by adding them to the project settings of the aabsigner in the ci-utilities repository. To clear the 24.02 release branch of KTrip for AAB signing we add the following to aabsigner-projects.yaml:

utilities/ktrip:
  applicationid: org.kde.ktrip
  branches:
    release/24.02:

See the documentation of the aabsigner's project settings for details.

When we now run a CI/CD pipeline for KTrip on the release/24.02 branch, only after a successful completion of the craft_android_appbundle_qt66 job can we trigger the sign_aab_qt66 job. Once the latter finishes, this job will have signed the AAB that was created by the craft_android_appbundle_qt66 job. Download the signed AAB by browsing the job artifacts and remember where you saved it for the next part of the tutorial.

If the sign_aab_qt66 job logs show the following:

Branch 'release/24.02' of project 'utilities/ktrip' is not cleared for signing. Skipping.

Then we may have to ask sysadmin to restart the aabsigner service so that it loads the updated project settings.

Summary

In this part of the tutorial we have configured the CI/CD system to create an Android App Bundle (AAB) of KTrip on the release/24.02 branch. We have signed the AAB with the help of the CI/CD system and downloaded the signed AAB.