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Self-Publishing to the Apple App Store

This guide will show you how to get your app onto Apple Store so you can submit it for App Store review and approval.

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All the steps described in this guide must be followed after Exporting your app from Draftbit and make sure to follow post export steps to add correct versioning.

You will also need an Expo account. If you already have an account with Expo, log in into your account.

After creating the Expo account, open the terminal window and make sure to run expo login. It will prompt for credentials that you just used to create an Expo account.

Create an Apple Developer account

The next step before building your app's binary and submitting it to the App store is to create a new Developer account using an existing Apple ID. Also, make sure that your Apple ID has two-factor authentication enabled. If not, read here on how to enable it.

  • Go to https://appleid.apple.com/#!&page=signin and sign in to your Apple ID account
  • After signing in, go to https://developer.apple.com/programs/enroll/. Check to agree to all of the terms.
  • Apple requires a $99 (USD) enrollment fee per year to create a developer account.
  • On the next web page choose whether you want your Apple Developer account to be an individual or an organization.
  • You would choose an organization if your app is for a business. This means that the company information is shown in the app store listing rather than your personal information. Note: Your company must already be a legal entity for you to choose this option.
  • If you choose an organization, Apple will require you to enter your organization's DUNS number.
  • To see if your organization already has a DUNS number go here. If you don’t have it, you can request it here.
  • This process will take around 14 business days.
  • If you are registering for Apple Developer account as an individual, it may take up to 48 hours to get your new account reviewed by the Apple team.
  • Once you have filled everything out click Submit and your application should now be processing with Apple.

Building iOS app

Open up a terminal window, navigate to your Draftbit app's directory and execute the command below:

eas build --platform ios

This will launch a series of prompts that you can answer like so:

  • Would you like to run 'git init' in the current directory? select yes.
  • Commit message: press enter.
  • This project is not configured to build with EAS. Set it up now? select yes.
  • Can we commit these changes to git for you? select yes.
  • Commit message: › Configure EAS Build for iOS. Press enter.

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After this step, your eas.json file will be generated. Since Xcode 15 and iOS 17 were released on September 18th, 2023. In order to use Xcode 15 on EAS Build, you should set the ios.image field on your build profile to latest

Here's what to add in your generated 'eas.json' file:

{
  "build": {
    "production": {
      "ios": {
        "image": "latest"
      }
    }
  }
}
  • Do you want to login into your Apple account? select yes.

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If you have not generated a provisioning profile and/or distribution certificate yet, you can let EAS CLI take care of that for you by signing into your Apple Developer Program account and following the prompts.

  • Would you like to use this certificate? select yes.
  • Would you like to use this Push Key? select yes.
  • Will you provide your own Apple Provisioning Profile? select Let Expo handle the process.
  • Will you provide your own Apple Push Notification Key? select Let Expo handle the process.

The process of building the app will take some time. After the process, the EAS CLI will return a success message (if the building of the app was successful) and generate a URL that contains build details as shown below:

After this process is finished, it will also give you the link to your app. Save this URL. You will need it in the next step.

You can also copy and paste this link in your browser to download your app's .ipa.

🍎 iOS app: https://expo.io/artifacts/eas/xxxxxxxx.ipa

Submit app to the App Store using EAS CLI

To submit your app to the App Store, run the below command:

eas submit --platform ios

This command will initially prompt you to login into your Apple account with the same Apple ID. After completing its initial steps, it will prompt:

  • What would you like to submit? Select the option I have a url to the app archive.
  • And then paste the URL you saved from the previous step.
  • Next prompt will be, Your Apple App-specific password. To create an apple app-specific password, in a web browser, sign in to your Apple ID account.
  • Go to the Security section and click Generate Password under App-Specific Passwords. Copy it.
  • Go back to the terminal window and paste the value to the prompt.

This will take at least 5 to 10 minutes to submit the binary of your app to the Apple App Store. Once the submission process is complete, you will receive an email from Apple.

Updated 2 months ago