- Introduction to Publishing Apps 1:39
- Removing Log Calls 4:23
- Building a Release-Ready APK 4:25
- Review: Getting An App Ready for Google Play 5 questions
- The Google Play Developer Console 3:08
- Uploading an APK 7:26
- Review: Publishing on Google Play 5 questions
- Creating the Store Listing 4:59
- Updating an Existing App 4:22
- Review: Publishing and Updating an App 5 questions
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Removing Log Calls
4:23The first thing we need to do to prepare our app for release is remove any Log method calls. In this video we'll see how to easily do this with a tool called ProGuard.
There is a ton of useful information on
the Android developer site about how to
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publish an app.
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Just click on Distribute up here at the
top, and
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then Google Play over here on the left.
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This can be a little overwhelming though,
navigating all this documentation.
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Which is why I'm here.
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Just know that you can find lots of
information about anything not covered in
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these videos.
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And, as always, check out the Treehouse
forum for additional help or discussion.
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Now, there's also a helpful publishing
overview document in
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the Develop section here.
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So lets navigate to Develop > Tools.
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And then on the left we want to select
Workflow and in here, one more time,
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go down to Publishing.
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Now specifically, we want to look at this
section called Preparing for Release.
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Now see [LAUGH] I told you there was a lot
of information in here about publishing.
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Maybe too much.
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Anyhow, I wanna highlight a section down
here that says,
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turn off logging and debugging.
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We want to make sure we disable any calls
to any log methods,
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because they can affect performance of our
app.
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And we don't wanna clutter the log head
either.
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So we need to change a few settings in our
app before we publish it.
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It seems like a pain, but thankfully,
there's an easy way to do this.
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Where we don't have to go in and remove
every single call to a log method.
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Now you're wondering yes, we can publish
an app without doing this step, but
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it's recommended that we do it for those
performance reasons.
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It's also a nice safety for us as
developers in case we accidentally left in
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a bunch of verbose logging that would
really impact how the app runs.
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In the fun facts app, we only have one log
statement, so
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it would be easy to either comment it out
or remove it, it's not important.
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But often on bigger applications, we might
have hundreds of log statements or more.
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And we don't want to change all that code
every time we publish and
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update to the app.
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Now fortunately, there's a very easy way
to do this automatically with our
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tools and Android studio.
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Android developer tools include something
called,
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ProGuard, that can be configured to affect
our final APK in different ways.
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There's a lot we can do with the ProGuard
tool.
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But for now, all we are concerned about is
adding some statements to
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strip calls to any of the log methods.
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To do this, we need to change two files.
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First, open up the build.gradle file, here
in the app modules.
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So, here, under App.
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It's, you can find it under the source
directory and
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then double click on build.gradle.
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In here notice the build type section and
inside is a section for release builds.
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Which is again, what we're about to build.
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By default, ProGuard is turned off with
this run Proguard line which is
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set to false.
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So, let's enable it by changing false to
true.
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The next line here gets some standard
default Proguard settings from
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the file listed right here, get default
Proguard file, pro-guardandroid.txt.
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The second file listed over here is where
we can add some custom commands.
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But wait, we actually need to switch to a
different standard file.
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This may be a a little confusing, but
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hopefully it makes sense here at the end
when we get it working.
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So here where it says proguard-android,
before the .txt add -optimize.
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This uses a different default ProGuard
file that is better suited for
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optimizing our APK file.
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Okay, now let's sync these gradle changes
using this sync gradle button up here.
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Anytime we make a change to gradle
settings in here,
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we need to sync the changes.
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Okay, now it's working down here.
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And okay, it finished without any errors.
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Cool.
So now we
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can edit the proguard-rules file listed
over here.
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This is located in our project directory
as well.
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Once again, it's in the app module,
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and it's right here below our build.gradle
file.
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So let's double click on this.
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Now, when we open this we see everything
is commented out with the hash tags here
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at the beginning of the lines.
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I'm going to paste in some lines that are
available in the teacher's notes below for
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you to copy and paste as well.
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So, this is an option for Proguard called
assumenosideeffects.
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This is only applicable when optimizing.
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Which is why we had to switch to that
other default file.
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But the basic idea is that these methods
listed here from the log class,
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named up here, will be removed by
proguard.
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Okay, let's save the changes to this file,
and
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now we're ready to build our release ready
APK.
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I should note though,
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that if you are logging sensitive
information, like sensitive user details.
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You will need to use a different method to
remove the strings that
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are actually logged in the log methods.
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APK files can be de compiled and people
can actually look at your code.
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So you need to remember this if you're
ever coding sensitive information.
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The actual calls to these log methods are
stripped, but
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the code is still in here and it would be
visible when decompiled.
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