Flutter for Google Play

After settling on Flutter for Android development (abandoning Java, Kotlin, and React Native on the way), I'm pretty happy with it, but last year when I tried to upload a build of Talk Dim Sum to Google Play, I couldn't figure out how to get GP to accept my uploads.

I gave it another try today, and after a series of missteps while follwing the official doc, succeeded. The first mistake I made was not noticing that I needed to change signingConfigs.debug to signingConfigs.release in build.gradle

buildTypes {
       release {
           // TODO: Add your own signing config for the release build.
           // Signing with the debug keys for now,
           // so `flutter run --release` works.
           signingConfig signingConfigs.debug
       }
   }

I figured that out after a few consecutive complaints from Google Play that I was uploading a signed debug build.

After that, my appbundle builds generated error messages that the keystore was not in the correct format.  Turns out I needed to add append -storetype JKS to this keytool invocation on my Mac (they do include it in the Windows sample)

keytool -genkey -v -keystore ~/key.jks -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 -alias key

That parameter is included in the Windows sample invocation, and alluded to in the follow-on note.

From then on, all my problems were on the Google Play end.