Distribute via iTunes Connect

When you’re finally ready to distribute your application, you’ll need to sign up with iTunes Connect. You upload your application here, fill out a Paid Applications Contract if you want to sell your app, and view reports of how many people are downloading your app.

The steps for uploading an application outlined in the Distribution section of the iPhone Developer Program portal—4 major steps with a total of 42 sub-steps. Be especially careful as you follow these steps. Some mistakes won’t reveal themselves immediately. Instead, I’ll get to the point of uploading your application only to be greeted with the message, “The binary you uploaded was invalid. The signature was invalid, or it was not signed with an Apple submission certificate.” Consider it a rite of passage. For the record, it took me four hours before I managed to produce a properly signed binary. In retrospect, I believe I skipped step 4-7: “In the Properties Pane of the Target Info window, enter the Bundle Identifier portion of your App ID.” Either that or I forget to properly set the Bundle Identifier in my Info.plist file. It’s hard to say now. Somewhere along the way I managed to get my .xcodeproj file into an unsalvageable state and pieced my app back together one source file at a time in a new project.

Simultaneously, I was courting a bug in the Paid Applications Contract of the iTunes Connect website, “Error generating contract/s, please contact itunesconnect@apple.com for assistance.” I did so, and Apple was very responsive.

Though some have commented on the wait involved in the app review and approval process, my initial experience was so positive that I feared something must have gone wrong in the system: How Long ‘Til was approved within 24 hours. Since then, I’ve published an update to the app, and for this, second time, the update approval process took a few days.

Given the stop and go nature of iPhone development, perhaps it would be nice if someone made a flowchart detailing all the steps. Perhaps that someone will be me. Stay tuned for next time.