android side has been shipping to internal testers for a month, ios has not been touched. i have a windows laptop, an iphone for testing, and a lot of confusion about certificates, provisioning profiles and what eas creates for me versus what i have to make in a portal. tell me the minimum sequence to get a build onto my own phone and then into testflight, and what it costs.
Two more free things worth knowing. A simulator build does not need any of the paid credentials, so if you have a friend with a mac you can hand them a build to look at before you spend the 99. And your bundle identifier is effectively permanent once you have shipped, so choose a reverse domain you will still own in four years rather than something with your old company name in it.
New app record, new listing, no reviews carried over, existing installs orphaned. People have done it and it is always a bad week.
the bundle id point is the kind of thing i would have discovered too late. changing it later is a new app entirely, right?
The thing that catches everyone at exactly your stage is agreements. If the paid apps agreement has not been accepted in App Store Connect, submissions fail with an error that does not mention agreements at all. Check that before you spend an evening on certificates that were fine the whole time.
Slight disagreement with letting the tooling own everything, at least for teams. Generated credentials living only in the build service is fine for a solo dev and awkward the day someone else needs to ship while you are away. Export the keys and keep them somewhere your future collaborator can reach, even if that is just a password manager entry with a note.
Budget for review time, not just build time. The build is 15 to 25 minutes on a good day, the first TestFlight processing is another 10 to 40, and getting the first external testing group approved is a separate wait. My first ios release slipped four days entirely on things that were not compiling.
@baseweight_bel · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Minimum sequence: enrol in the Apple Developer Program at 99 USD a year, log in with eas credentials so it can talk to your account, then run a build with the internal distribution profile and let it generate the distribution certificate and provisioning profile for you. For your own phone you register the device first so its identifier lands in the profile, and eas has a command that gives you a QR code to do that from the phone. For TestFlight you build with the store profile and submit, and TestFlight is included in the 99 rather than an extra cost.
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@vlookup_refugee · 2mo ago
Almost never. You will visit it for the paid agreements, for push notification setup if you use a third party service, and on the day something is in a weird state and you need to revoke a certificate. Otherwise let the tooling own it, because hand-made profiles and generated ones fighting each other is the classic mess.
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@venv_val · 2mo ago
so i never open the developer portal by hand at all?
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