I can’t tell you how relieved I felt last week when I finally managed to get the App uploaded to the Apple App Store and saw the status change from “Waiting for upload” to “Waiting for review” instead of “Invalid binary”. The process had been painful and there was precious little help from Apple in diagnosing the problems.

Provisioning for distribution

The first step in the App Store submission process is to prepare the binary package in a format acceptable to Apple. This involves obtaining two new files from the development portal. You need a distribution signing certificate and a distribution mobile provisioning file. These files are used to create the distribution binary package in the same way as the development packages are created for testing the App on suitably provisioned test devices.

This is a fairly straightforward task but I have a big problem with it because it means that I had to create an upload package using files and tools in a way that I can not test before uploading to the Apple Store. This might not sound much of a big deal but I’ve been creating software solutions for more than 35 years and experience tells me that that if something has not been tested then there is likely to be a problem with it. This time I had to trust myself to get it right and hope for the best.

You can not do this without an Apple Mac

The next problem was uploading the package to the App Store but before I could do that I had to take the “.api” file, un archive it and re-zip it up on an Apple Mac computer. The archive can only be produced on a Mac as it adds some codes that are not used by other archivers. As I had created this App as an Adobe Air project on a Windows machine I had to find a Mac to perform this step. I also knew that the package can only be uploaded to the App Store from a Mac and I don’t actually own a Mac. I had to find a friend with a Mac who was prepared to do this for me.

Luckily my friend Huw has a Mac and he was interested to see how this process works so we were set to go. After he had unzipped and rezipped the package he downloaded the Application Uploader software and attempted to upload the App for me. When this App finally gets approved I will need to acquire a Mac to maintain Apps in the store.

Restrictions on members

We noticed that we were only allowed to upload Apps using the member account designated “Agent”. It was set to the originator of the main account who was not involved with the development process. We tried to reassign the Agent role to one of the developers using the portal. Unfortunately all attempts to do this failed so we ended up logging in with the main account that we knew had the Agent role assigned. Not ideal but that seemed to work.

Invalid binary!

All appeared to be well during the upload and I saw the status change from “Waiting for upload” to “Upload received” and I thought we were winning. Then the status changed to “Invalid binary” and our hearts sank.

What was wrong? Well the App Store is supposed to send you an email when this happens containing a description of the problem but we didn’t get anything. We tried again from different accounts and attempted other minor changes but nothing worked. Invalid binary every time. It took us two days to find the problem and in the end it was so simple yet so not obvious. I shall leave the explanation of this to a later post.

So now it is uploaded and it has a status of “Waiting for review”. Review is when a human tester will give the App a test drive and I have every reason to believe that they will find something wrong with it that I will have to fix before they approve it. Until then I can relax.

If you have an Android phone you can try it out right now by installing it from Google Play Concert Tipper. If you have an iPhone then it should be available in the Apple App store soon.