Short answer: publishing an app on Google Play costs a one-off $25 for a developer account, and if that account is a personal one created after 13 November 2023, Google will not let the app into the store until it has run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in continuously for 14 days. Then you apply for production access, Google reviews the answers in about a week, and the app goes live. Everything else is forms.
You may not need the store at all
Android is the platform that lets you skip this. An app can install on any Android phone from a link, with no developer account and no review. On Glassly that is what the install page is: a link and a QR code that always serves the newest build, so your friends, your members or your customers can be using the app today. The one footnote is that the newest Android phones sometimes add a one-time 24 hour wait before they trust a new developer, which is Google’s rule and happens once.
Google Play adds three things: strangers can find the app, updates arrive without anyone tapping a link, and a store listing looks like the real thing to a customer. If you want those, here is how to publish an app on Google Play, in order.
1. Open a Google Play developer account
It costs $25, once. Google verifies who you are: an ID for a personal account, a D-U-N-S number and business documents for an organisation account. The account has to be yours. No builder can publish under its own name on your behalf, and any that offers to is putting your app in its account, not yours.
2. Get a signed release package
Google Play takes an Android App Bundle, signed with a key that stays the same for the life of the app. This is the part that needs a build pipeline. Glassly produces that signed bundle for you as part of the same build that makes the install link, so there is nothing to compile and no key to lose.
3. Create the app in the Play Console and fill in the listing
Name, short and long descriptions, an icon, screenshots, a category, a content rating questionnaire, a data safety form and a privacy policy URL. The privacy policy and the data safety answers trip people up because they need to describe what the app collects. We hand you the links and the answers those forms need for the app we built, so you are copying, not guessing.
4. The Google Play 12 testers rule
This is the step that stops most first-time publishers, so read it twice. For personal developer accounts created after 13 November 2023, Google requires a closed test with a minimum of 12 testers who have been opted in continuously for at least 14 days. Testers who join, test for fewer than 14 days and leave do not count. If one leaves and comes back, the 14 days start again. Organisation accounts are exempt.
Twelve people for two weeks is easy for a club, a class or a team and hard for someone building alone. Two notes. First, if the app already installs from a link, your testers are people already using it, so ask the ones who already have it. Second, there are paid tester-exchange services, and Google’s production questionnaire asks what feedback the test produced and what you changed because of it; a test that produced nothing is a weak answer. Real users, real feedback.
5. Apply for production access
Once the 14 days are done, the Play Console dashboard lets you apply. You answer questions in three sections: what the closed test involved, what the app does, and whether it is ready for production. Google says review usually takes seven days or less. When it passes, you can release to production, and Google reviews that release too, typically in a few days for a new app.
What it costs in total
$25 to Google, once. Nothing extra on our side: every plan includes the signed bundle, and templates are free. Compare Apple, where the developer account is $99 a year and the only way onto an iPhone at all. Publishing an app on Google Play is cheaper, slower to start because of the testing rule, and optional, because the link works without it.
Put the app on twelve phones today with the link. In two weeks, the store is a form.