Packaging and publishing applications for Android
Learn how to package and publish your applications for Android
Last updated
Learn how to package and publish your applications for Android
Last updated
This tutorial will guide you in packaging an application for Android and publishing it in one of KDE's F-Droid repositories.
We assume that there is already a working blueprint for the application you want to package and publish. If not then read the tutorial on .
We use as example.
In the first step we configure the CI/CD pipeline of Kongress in KDE's GitLab, so that it creates APKs. We do this by adding the template /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-apks.yml to the .gitlab-ci.yml file of Kongress:
This template adds four jobs to CI/CD pipeline of Kongress:
craft_android_qt66_arm32, craft_android_qt66_arm64, and craft_android_qt66_x86_64 which build APKs for three different processor architectures, and
fdroid_apks_qt66 which we will look at a bit later.
When we now run a CI/CD pipeline for Kongress then, after successful completion, the three craft_android_* jobs will have created APKs which we can download by browsing the job artifacts. You'll find the APKs in the folder .kde-ci-packages/.
By default, the APKs are not signed. If you want to install such an APKs on your device then you have to sign it as described in the [previous tutorial]({{< ref "building_applications#signing-apks" >}}).
When we now run a CI/CD pipeline for Kongress on the release/24.02 branch then the three craft_android_* jobs will create signed APKs which you can install on your device without having to sign them yourself.
Now that we have signed APKs created for the latest release branch of Kongress we want to publish them in our F-Droid repository to make it easier to install and update Kongress. But before we do this we download the APK, install it on our device and perform a more or less thorough test to ensure that the APK works.
These settings tell the CI/CD system that the APKs built on the master branch shall be published in the default repository (which is the nightly builds repository) and that the APKs built on the release/24.02 branch shall be published in the release builds repository.
In this tutorial we have learned how to configure KDE's CI/CD system to package an application for Android and how to publish it in one of KDE's F-Droid repositories so that our users can easily install it.
Now we configure our CI/CD system, so that it signs the APKs created by the CI/CD pipeline. The CI/CD system signs APKs on project branches which are cleared for APK signing. We want to sign the APKs created for the 24.02 release branch. Project branches are cleared for APK signing by adding them to the in the ci-utilities repository. To clear the 24.02 release branch of Kongress for APK signing we add the following to apksigner-projects.yaml:
See the documentation of the for details.
After we have verified that the APK works we configure the CI/CD system to publish the APKs created for the 24.02 release branch of Kongress in our . For this we add the following to the :
See the documentation of the for details.