Play Listing

Play Listing

Creating a Play Console Listing

Creating the app and its listing is the same form-filling for every toolkit, so follow Play Console Submission's table (Home > Create app, then the dashboard's setup tasks) and Store Listings and Screenshots's asset rules: a 30-character name, an 80-character short description, up to 4,000 characters of full description, a 512 x 512 icon, a 1024 x 500 feature graphic, and phone screenshots cropped to 9:16 from the emulator's 9:20. A developer account costs a one-time US$25, so these steps come from the Play Console 1 Help and were not run here.

What a native project changes is how much of the listing Play reads from the bundle rather than from you. aapt2 dump badging prints the same manifest facts Play extracts on upload:

What Play reads from BookNest's releaseKotlin

aapt2 dump badging app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk | grep -E \
  "^package|SdkVersion|application-label:|feature|native-code|supports-screens"

Output

package: name='com.example.booknest' versionCode='10000' versionName='1.0.0'
    platformBuildVersionName='17' platformBuildVersionCode='37' compileSdkVersion='37'
    compileSdkVersionCodename='17'
minSdkVersion:'26'
targetSdkVersion:'36'
application-label:'BookNest'
feature-group: label=''
  uses-feature-not-required: name='android.hardware.camera'
  uses-feature-not-required: name='android.hardware.location'
  uses-feature: name='android.hardware.faketouch'
  uses-implied-feature: name='android.hardware.faketouch' reason='default feature for all apps'
supports-screens: 'small' 'normal' 'large' 'xlarge'
native-code: 'arm64-v8a' 'armeabi-v7a' 'x86' 'x86_64'

The package name, version and SDK levels become the release's identity and filters. Every uses-feature line is a device filter: Play shows the app only to devices that have each required feature, and permissions can add features you never declared. BookNest's first release build printed uses-feature: name='android.hardware.location', implied by its location permissions, which would have hidden it from every device without location hardware for one optional screen (Location and Sensors). The manifest now says <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.location" android:required="false" />, as it already did for the camera. native-code lists four ABIs only because AndroidX 234 ships tiny native libraries (Play Policies); Play serves each phone its own. Take the listing's screenshots from the signed release, as Publishing the Native BookNest does.

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