iOS App Distribution

Apple provides 2 web based resources to aid you as you bring your app to the App Store:

the Developer Portal

and App Store Connect. Let’s take a look at each of these resources, and discuss what they provide.

The Developer Portal is where you can get access to everything connected to your Apple Developer Program. This includes the following:

Program Resources. You can access the certificates, identifiers, devices, profiles and keys that are associated with your account.

These are either generated by Xcode, or can be manually created by you from the portal.

You can get access to different areas of App Store Connect from here, which you’ll learn about later in this episode.

You can also access the users associated with your account, software downloads, such as software betas, web interfaces to Xcode Cloud, CloudKit, and information on MapKit JS.

Membership Details. In addition to setting your email preferences, you can get the information on your membership, such as the renewal date and your Team ID.

Other account information. You can also see when you can reset your device list. This allows you to update the devices you are able to test on, as the number is limited for each type.

You can also see how many Technical Support Incidents you have left to use this year. These TSIs let you get code-level support for Apple frameworks, APIs and tools from an Apple Engineer.

Finally, you can see the agreements you have entered as part of your developer account membership. These may vary depending on which program you are a part of.

Xcode helped us take care of things like certificates and provisioning profiles that are handled in the Developer Portal. Having access to those items through the Developer Portal is great, since sometimes Xcode gets confused. This does happen less and less nowadays, though. Let’s walk through a few of those areas of the portal so you’re at least familiar with them in case you need to create elements by hand.

Here’s the Developer Portal page. The top 4 items here - Certificates, Identifiers, Devices, and Profiles, are where you will probably spend most of your time.

Certificates list the developer and distribution certificates that have been associated with this team. The blue plus button allows you create a new certificate. This includes certificates for broad Apple development and distribution, as well as push notifications, Wallet passes, website push, and more. Note that there is currently a maximum of 3 distribution certificates per account. This means that 3 different people can handle distribution of your app. That capability is restricted to team admin or owner roles in App Store Connect.

Identifiers lists all the IDs that have been associated with this team. Clicking the blue plus button shows that this is more than just App IDs - services, pass types, website push, iCloud containers and more all have associated IDs that can be managed from here.

The devices section shows you the devices that have been registered with this team. The given name, UDID and type are all visible here. Yearly, you get the option to remove devices from your list, since you have a limit per device type.

Finally, the profiles section shows you the developer and distribution profiles that are associated with this team. You can make new profiles here as well.

You’ll get some hands on experience with creating devices and profiles in the Developer Portal later in the course.

App Store Connect, on the other hand, is the place to go for information about the apps you have placed, or plan to place, on the App Store. This includes:

Your apps. Here you can see each of the apps you have in App Store Connect, and edit the record metadata for each app. This can range from basic information about your app, to information for reviewers, to generating promo codes. You’ll learn more about app records and metadata later in the course.

App Analytics. Here, you can see information such as impressions, product page views, crashes, downloads by territory, and more.

Sales and Trends. Here you can get data to understand your app’s performance from a sales point of view. You can even download reports to run your own deeper analyses.

Payments and Reports. Here, you can see your proceeds for each month, broken down by territory and currency. You can also download additional reports to get insights into metrics such as number of units sold per app.

Users and Access, and Agreements. These were also accessible from the Developer Portal, and may be different based on what developer program you are in.

When dealing with App Store Connect, there’s a lot to make sure you get right, so you’ll learn about that more in the next 2 episodes - Creating App Records, and App Record Metadata.