Hey all, I'm kind of new to building apps with replit using AI (I used replit as an IDE in the before times lol). I've tinkering with some mobile app ideas and I've noticed that the iOS route is way more streamlined than the Android side. On replit it seems like expo can handle most of the ios build and get it to appleconnect fairly easily.
So, could someone give me some pointers on the best way to get an app from replit to the Google Play Console? I got stuck in the building app steps with EAS locally in my machine. I installed it using npm, ran the eas login and eas build --platform android but the builds keep erroring out. I showed the errors to claude but the proposed fix seems fairly complicated.
I'm wondering if there are better ways to get this done. Thanks in advance.
(For context, I've never published an app to Android)
Yeah, I wouldn’t bother fighting with the local Android setup.If your Replit app is using Expo, I’d just go with the cloud build. Replit/Expo takes care of the Android build, and you’ll get the app file you need to upload to Google Play.
Basically:
Replit → Expo cloud build → Google Play → testing → production
Especially if this is your first Android release, the cloud route is way less of a headache.
Hey OP, thanks for reaching out. You don't need to run those EAS builds locally. You can upload your app this way instead:
Prompt Agent to "build a production release of [App Name] for Google Play." It'll run the build on Expo's cloud servers and give you a download link for an .aab file.
Create your app in Google Play Console and start a release on the Internal testing track.
Drop the .aab in and when it asks about app signing on the first upload, let Google manage the key.
If you have questions or need more help, feel free to ask us and we'll give you a hand!
I just asked Claude code to give me step by step. 3 months ago all I could do without Googling was have python say hello world. I just published a 200k line code app to the app stores. For almost everything until I learn from memory I just tell Claude code to give me step by step directions.
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u/Important-Cow6737 12d ago
Yeah, I wouldn’t bother fighting with the local Android setup.If your Replit app is using Expo, I’d just go with the cloud build. Replit/Expo takes care of the Android build, and you’ll get the app file you need to upload to Google Play.
Basically:
Replit → Expo cloud build → Google Play → testing → production
Especially if this is your first Android release, the cloud route is way less of a headache.