Deploying my Expo apps to Google Play - lessons learned

After releasing my iOS apps, I wanted to bring them to Android. Since both were built with Expo, I expected it to be easy - and it mostly was! Still, I ran into a few surprises along the way that might help others doing the same.

⚙️ 1. Porting with Expo

The best part? No big code changes needed.

Expo made it super simple to build for Android - I didn't need to eject or do any deep platform-specific setup. But when I started testing, I noticed something off…

🖋️ 2. UI issues - font sizes on Android

Some screens looked slightly off on Android.

It turns out Android renders font sizes just a bit larger than iOS, so my UI spacing broke in a few places. My fix: I wrote a small helper function to automatically scale font sizes down slightly on Android devices.

import { Platform } from "react-native";

export const normalizeFont = (size: number) => {
  return Platform.OS === "android" ? size * 0.95 : size;
};

Tiny tweak, big difference - everything looked balanced again.

🧩 3. Google Play configuration

Here's where it got trickier. To publish, I had to:

Generate and upload keystores (Expo does this automatically if you don't have one).
Add the keys to Firebase for Android integration.
Download and include the google-services.json file in my Expo project (in the app/ folder).

Expo's build process using eas build -p android handled most of it, but double-checking the Firebase connection was key.

🔐 4. Google Authentication setup

Since my apps already used Firebase, enabling Google Auth for Android was easy - Firebase linked it automatically through the connected project. No extra manual setup needed besides enabling the provider in Firebase Console.

🧪 5. Closed testing - finding testers

I didn't have many Android users among my friends, so I tried a few things:

Posted testing invites on X, Reddit, and daily.dev
Found an awesome app called "12 Testers - Closed Test Pro" on Google Play, where devs test each other's apps for 14 days.

That community feedback helped a ton before the public release.

✅ 6. Review and approval

After fixing UI details and testing everything, both apps were reviewed and approved without issues! The process was actually smoother than the iOS review 😅

📱 Finally - my apps are now live!

🍱 TinyRecipe is live on:

💰 TinyDebt is live on:

💡 Final thoughts

If you're using Expo, deploying to Android is surprisingly smooth - most hurdles are design-related rather than technical. Testing across devices is key, but once that's handled, the Play Store pipeline feels quick and dev-friendly.