So I’m calling this part of my journey to publish BotSumo on iOS an “adventure”, because “annoyance” sounded too negative. It sort of was an adventure, because it was a journey of twists and turns, pitfalls, and irritations to overcome.
The part this blog article is about is creating a developer account with apple, and creating a certificate so that I can create an app in itunes connect. I’m recording this, mostly because I think I might need to look at this later, and a few of the guides I’ve seen are a bit out of date now. In fact the official Unity video documentation for this actually misses this entire step out.
First, I had to create an apple developer account at https://developer.apple.com – This is mostly straightforward. You have to pay them some money (recurring annually, which is annoying). The weirdest part of this process was this form.
How many people know what “romanized” means? I was tempted to write my name as Davidus Ballus VI, but resisted. Also what about people with accents in their name?
Anyway, I then received an email saying I’ve paid “The Apple” (seriously guys, sort it out), so now apparently I have to head over to itunesconnect.apple.com – no idea what this has to do with iTunes, as I’m not making music. Maybe a legacy thing?
According to the Unity video this part was straightforward, click on “Apps” and then the plus icon to create a new one, and enter details. But I can’t get this far because I see this:
This entire process is unknown to me, so I click “register one here”. The next page has a series of steps to create a certificate. It’s unclear to me at this point if a bundle and certificate are the same, but I’m just going along with the instructions.
It says the easiest way is to use Xcode. I definitely want the easiest way!
But because I’ve no idea what I’m doing, I don’t even have this Xcode thingie. So download that. It screws up my git in PHPstorm temporarily which panics me because I need that, but restarted PHPstorm and it’s fine.
Anyway, I open Xcode and can’t find anything about managing certificates, maybe it’s this bit?
I can’t find anything that mentions a bundle ID or certificate though, but login using my Apple ID because I thought that will probably help.
Failing to find what I need in Xcode, I begrudgingly start the manual process.
There’s a lot of options here and I’m reasonably sure it’s just the first one I need. But it looks like I’ll need to come back here again to get a production certificate.
So on my way to getting a Bundle ID, I’m now a side-quest to get a CSR. This feels like one of those old-school adventure games like Dizzy, where you have to give flour to a baker to give bread to the rat or whatever.
So now I’m in keychain, requesting a certificate, and it’s asking me my “Common name”. I’ve never heard my name called “common” before, but whatever.
Also, funny thing about is form is that it says “CA Email address” is required. but the instructions say to leave this blank. Perfectly clear.
Now I can download the file from itunesconnect.
I open this file and it adds something to my keychain.
I’ve been using a Mac for a while now, but have mostly been ignoring keychain, and how it works. So I was a bit confused by that dropdown in the bottom right. I was unaware there were different keychains. I changed this from “login” to “iCloud” because that seems like it’ll be backed up, but that could have been a mistake because it gave me an error. I kept it on the default one called “login”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At this point, or maybe earlier, you’ve probably realised that I have no idea what I’m doing, and am just bumbling through this entire process.
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.
After going through this process once it probably just becomes sensible and normal. But the first time… yeah. Feels pretty weird.
The process for getting an app on the Google Play Store was also a bit weird, I admit (I wrote about that here), but this seems to have a lot of steps, and I’m not anywhere near uploading my app yet.
So I’m looking back on what I’ve actually accomplished here, and err…. nothing. Yet. I haven’t got my app uploaded, or even got this mysterious “bundle ID”.
But I’m on the right track, I think actually the way to get the Bundle ID is through Xcode, and uploading the project from there.
Next steps
Follow this tutorial which shows how to export the game from Unity, and edit it in Xcode. It looks like Xcode is vital to this whole process. Also this guy (video below) has a good video about the whole process. He’s not uploading from Unity, so it’s a bit different, but it shows the lengthy process of using Xcode anyway.