Android signed release APKs

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1

I am setting up Jenkins jobs for doing Android snapshot and release builds (APK and AAR) using Gradle and Maven plugin. So far, I have been running ‘assemble uploadArchives’ for both snapshot and release builds to publish to Artifactory. However, now I need to sign the release build for APK and trying to understand the implications of adding this to ‘build.gradle’

...
android {
    ...
    defaultConfig { ... }
    signingConfigs {
        release {
            storeFile file("myreleasekey.keystore")
            storePassword "password"
            keyAlias "MyReleaseKey"
            keyPassword "password"
        }
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            ...
            signingConfig signingConfigs.release
        }
    }
}
...

Questions: 1) What does this mean for AAR builds for ‘assembleRelease’ task? Does it also sign it and if so, is that the right thing to do? 2) What does this mean for snapshot builds? Does it also sign it and if so, is that the right thing to do?

Thanks, Bob