I finally published my first app in the Google Play Store. Hector the little dinosaur is live!
This was a great journey and the Flutter code was the easiest part of the whole process.
Publishing on the Play Store is not straightforward, and I didn't even face the App Store yet. Every time you publish a new release you will need to wait for Google to review and make it available even for an internal test. Normally it takes just a few hours. I was publishing new tests at night and they were visible the morning after. At times, especially at the beginning, it took days.
The issue is the lack of control with no clear indication. You wait for a notification and after that you also wait some more in order to see the changes in the store.
I left all the store listing optimisation to Aurelie since she is the author and illustrator of the book, and accessorily an SEO/ASO expert! 🙀 That's why it looks very good!
Here are a few milestones I'd like to share.
May the 27th: App live for the first time!
This was the first time I've seen the word published close to the app listing. I received a notification saying the app passed the review and it was live but in reality I had to wait a good half a day in order to be able to share a link to install it. It's an internal beta so just a predefined set of friends had access to it. People also needed to follow a particular process in order to install this test version. Here is the documentation about it.
Jun the 4th: Public Beta!
Internal testing is great but not exactly easy to send to friends and family so I decided to move to a public Beta.
The App was working fine and after some feedbacks we decided to change a little the ui. Now images are not cut and they fit into the page leaving black borders around and we also added next and previous button in order to make the navigation more explicit.
Jun the 9th: Pushing the red button 🚨
After a couple of public betas it's time to promote the last one to Production. I don't know how long it will take but it should be available soon.
Jun the 10th: The app is live
Here is the link to the play store where you can finally find the app! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hector.the.little.dinosaur
That was definitely the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
This is how the book finishes and how this series of post about my first app written in Flutter ends.
I don't regret the choice. I found working with Flutter quite interesting and fun. I had a small amount of issues during the development and I was able to find a way out from all of them. It has been a great experience, everything went very well.
I can't say I'm an expert now, I would rather say I'm a junior Flutter developer but I'm a proud publisher! I made different websites in the past but publishing an app has been a completely new experience and I'm really happy to have done it.
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