Building

Although Accrescent accepts app submissions directly from developers, the process for building and signing an app is slightly different than what most developers are used to. Namely, Accrescent does not accept monolithic APKs. Read this section carefully to learn how to build apps in a format the Accrescent Developer Console will accept.

Setup

You need to install bundletool to build apps for Accrescent. bundletool is the open-source tool Google uses to generate split APKs from app bundles in the Play Store. Rather than signing split APKs from app bundles itself, Accrescent accepts split APKs generated and signed by developers.

There are two primary ways to use bundletool. The first (and easiest) way is using the bundletool Gradle plugin. The second is using the bundletool CLI. Both methods are covered in the following sections.

Bundletool Gradle plugin

Installation

Note: This plugin is only compatible with Android Gradle Plugin 7.4.0+.

Apply the bundletool Gradle plugin to your app as described in the plugin's home page. Then specify a signing configuration in your app-level build script as follows:

bundletool {
    signingConfig {
        storeFile = file("keystore.jks")
        storePassword = "password"
        keyAlias = "release"
        keyPassword = "12345"
    }
}

Notice the similarity to how signing configs are specified for your app.

Building

You can now build split APKs for your app by running ./gradlew buildApks${variant}. For example, if your app has a release variant, you can build the corresponding split APKs with the following command:

$ ./gradlew buildApksRelease

The resulting APK set will be generated as app/build/outputs/apkset/${variant}/app-${variant}.apks.

Bundletool CLI

Installation

bundletool can be installed from its GitHub releases. There's also an AUR package for Arch Linux users.

Building

There are two steps to building an app for Accrescent with the bundletool CLI:

Building the app bundle
Generating split APKs from the app bundle

See Google's documentation for how to build an app bundle (note: signing the bundle with an upload key is not necessary since the split APKs are signed later and are what is actually uploaded to Accrescent).

To build an APK set (set of split APKs) from bundletool, see bundletool's documentation. Be sure to provide a non-debug keystore to the build-apks command. The resulting APK set (.apks file) is what you will upload to the developer console.

Accrescent Documentation