Once the game was almost complete, it was time to think about distribution. There are many app stores available for Android, but the most commonly used one is the Google Play Store, so I decided that should be the first port of call.
The process is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is:
I had some friends who were willing to do some testing of the game before it went live. Thankfully, the Google Play Store has some facilities that make this pretty straightforward.
Before publishing your app to production (where anyone can find it on the Play Store), you can optionally publish it into Alpha or Beta test. You can set up a Google Group here, add your testers' email addresses to the group, and then within the Developer Console you can nominate that group to be eligible for testing your app.
You simply send your testers a link (provided by the Developer Console) which they can click on to opt in to the testing programme. Once they've done that, they can download the app, and they can automatically receive updated versions as you find and fix bugs.
When you're happy that you've fixed what you need to fix, you can simply 'promote' your APK into production, and it becomes available to everyone.
I tried a few different things when promoting the release of Leila and the Little Folk, but failed to find any particular success. Having send promotional emails to 40 or 50 review sites I failed to secure a single review.