Its a hassle to manually sign your APK's after you build them, you should definately automate this.

Its so simple, heres how:

Firstly create a keystore file if you haven't already:

# platforms/android/release-signing.properties

storeFile=/path/to/yourName.keystore
keyAlias=your_alias_name

# add these too if you dont want to manually enter your keystore and key password every time
storePassword=your_keystore_password
keyPassword=your_key_password

Now they will be signed during the build process with ionic build --release android

Related External Links:

• Baseico - how-to-automatically-sign-your-android-apk-using-ionic-framework-and-crosswalk/