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September 25, 2023
So you just finished building your new app but are not 100 % sure how to submit to the App Store? We’ve got you covered!
Over 60 % of all app submissions get rejected. By keeping an eye on the official App Store Review Guidelines you can prevent extra submissions and save time.
At the end of the day an app should perform well, offer a great UI/UX and comply with the law.
In order to publish apps on the AppStore you need to join the Apple Developer Program. Depending on your legal entity type, this step might take some time, so plan the sign-up in advance. The whole process might take from a few days of up to a few weeks.
For new developers this step can be confusing at first. Start by heading over to the Apple Developer Portal. After logging in you need to open the “Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles” Page.
First, start by adding a new identifier. The setup will guide you through. The important part is choosing a Bundle ID for your app. The Bundle ID identifies your app throughout the app ecosystem. Bundle IDs usually look a bit like this:
com.gleap.app
They need to be unique and are quite hard to change once you’ve set them up.
Move back to Xcode and open the preferences dialog. Under “Accounts” you need to sign in with your Apple ID. This enables Xcode to automatically manage the signing process for you.
Move to “Signing & Capabilities”. More recent versions of Xcode offer a feature called “automatically manage signing”. This saves a lot of time and is highly recommended these days.
Double check your Bundle ID and make sure that you activate the “Automatically manage signing” checkbox. Now hit run and let Xcode do the rest.
In order to upload an App to AppStore Connect, you first need to create a new app and fill in some basic information. Start by logging in to AppStore Connect.
After creating a new App by following the guidelines and selecting your previously created Bundle ID, you need to fill in all the app details. You may want to prepare an app description, name, screenshots and also (pro tip to gain more traction) an app video. You can create app screenshots and app videos easily within the iOS Simulator (we will cover this issue in a different blog article).
To make sure that your app doesn’t get rejected by the AppStore review team and receives a lot of love from your users, it needs to be tested very well. One of the tools to help you do exactly that is Gleap. It makes the testing process so much easier and faster. Since we at Gleap offer a 14-day free trial, I’d highly recommend giving it a try. Testing can be a lot of fun, too.
As you’ve now prepared your app within AppStore Connect, it’s time to upload an archive to their servers. Select “Any iOS Device” as build target in Xcode and start the building / archiving process by clicking on “Product” – “Archive” in the main menu bar.
Now you are ready to upload your archive to Apple’s servers by following the instructions after clicking on “Distribute App”. There are some other distribution channels available, which we will cover in separate a blog posts.
Last but not least you need to move back to AppStore Connect and select the uploaded binary. In order to select the binary, you might need to wait a few minutes as Apple processes it beforehand.
After selecting the binary, move on by submitting your app to review. Once the app got reviewed by Apple, it’s ready to be published. There are a few options for publishing your app. You might want to automatically release, manually release or schedule a release. After successfully releasing the app, it might take up to 24 hours until it’s finally available on the AppStore.
