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.
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:
- 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.