Submitting apps to Google Play
- Pay the $25 one-time fee.
- Sign APK with your keystore.
- Upload the APK.
- Upload screenshots and metadata.
- Hit publish.
Total time: 5 minutes.
Submitting an App to the App Store
- Pay $99 a year.
- Wait for Apple to dig through your articles of incorporation, then approve your membership.
- Apple tries to call your corporate attorney at 7:30 PM on a Friday and can’t figure out why he’s not answering.
- Apple ignores your emails asking them to call you back. Restart process.
- Obtain an intermediate certificate. Install into Keychain.
- Whitelist any devices you’ll be using to test with.
- Create development and distribution provisioning profiles for your app and system.
- Generate your certificate. Load everything into Keychain.
- Find out you need the newest MacOS that just came out last week in order to compile.
- Re-download the whole 5gb Xcode. Find out that there is now no backward compatibility with older iOS.
- Link up certificates to your Xcode project.
- Certificates don’t work for some inexplicable reason. Apple doesn’t know why. Revoke all certificates and go back to step 5.
- Spend two days trying to figure out a half dozen unhelpful error messages in Xcode, in-between bugs, freezes, crashes, and file corruption.
- Upload your icons and screenshots in dozens of sizes, including a 57×57 and 58×58 icon (WTF, seriously?).
- Compile for Release and pray the certificate works.
- Log into iTunes Connect and upload your screenshots (in 3 different sizes) and metadata. Mark it as ready for binary.
- Download Application Loader and open. Don’t use open or create package, they don’t do what you think they do.
- Navigate to ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData and try to figure out which folder is your latest release compile.
- Upload to Apple. If it rejects your certificate, even though it worked fine on your device, go back to step 5.
- Now that you painstakingly rebuilt your certificates, you find out the release cert won’t run on your device. Ironically, Application Loader accepts it this time.
- Wait anywhere from 1-3 weeks for Apple to review your app.
- Your app will likely get rejected. They’ll give an oddly-worded explanation why, leaving you to guess what they want you to fix.
- Have fun in Xcode. Go back to step 12.
- Congratulations, your app has been accepted. Grab a bottle of scotch, relax, and watch the nickels come rolling in.
Total time: 3 weeks.
I guess this should be a great hint of what I’m working on right now.