Changes

Up until this point in the book, we have been building application projects in a mode suitable for testing and debugging. Building an application package for release to customers via the Google Play store, on the other hand, requires that some additional steps be taken. The first requirement is that the application be compiled in release mode mode instead of debug mode. Secondly, the application must be signed with a private key that uniquely identifies you as the application’s developer. Finally, the application package must be aligned. This is simply a process by which some data files in the application package are formatted with a certain byte alignment to improve performance.