Tag: In-App Purchase

From zero to the App Store in one week-end

Build a complete app from scratch in a week-end? Challenge accepted! I started the project on Friday evening and submitted the app for review on the App Store on Sunday evening. It was accepted during the night and live on Monday morning.

So what was there time to do in just a weekend? Actually, a lot:

  • SwiftUI: I experimented a tiny bit of SwiftUI before, but nothing compares to building a real app!
  • GPS based location is retrieved in the background, reverse geocoded and stored in CoreData
  • Forms: automatically recording locations is cool, but you sometimes have to go and manually add or edit visits, SwiftUI makes it particularly easy to create dynamic forms with very little code and handles pretty much everything for you
  • In-App Purchase with a paywall selling a non-consumable product to unlock some features like yearly / country reports and PDF export
  • PDF generation from HTML templates, and export using a SwiftUI wrapped version UIActivityController
  • Analytics and Crashlytics integration using Firebase
  • App Store preparation: finding a name, writing description, creating a logo, preparing screenshots, submitting the In-App Purchase product
  • Submission!

What kind of issues did I run into?

  • SwiftUI is fun, but sometimes it’s just really hard to do something really simple (like presetting two modals / sheets from the same view), and sometimes you simply can’t do something simple (like removing the disclosure indicator from list cells without generating random crashes)
  • Fastlane didn’t want to work on my machine, I wanted to automate the screenshots but couldn’t, but it’s ok, since there is only one language for now and the app only support the iPhone, taking screenshots manually wasn’t too long
  • Apple randomly disabled submission from the version of Xcode available on the Mac App Store, and obviously the error message when submitting was super obscure… had to download the next coming GM from the developer download center

Is the code clean? Hell no! But was it fun to do? Absolutely! I don’t know if this app will ever sustain itself, but I’ve to admit we live in a time where very powerful tools are available for us to experiment and iterate really quickly. I’ll definitely do this kind of challenges again 🙂

Link to the app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trvl/id1487340379

Having fun with iTMSTransporter

I haven’t found much about this strange iTMSTransporter API enabling developers to script communication with iTunes Connect, so I dug and it was worth it.

Objective

I have 25 In-App Purchase products that are hosted by Apple, and these products need to be updated 2 to 4 times a year. Wow, that represents a lot of time, let’s write a script.

The solution : iTMSTransporter

The iTunes Connect
 Transporter is provided by Apple, an installer and the documentation are available through iTunes Connect under the “Resources & Help” section (you need to have a valid iTunes Connect account to access). Guess what? As an Xcode user, it’s already installed since the IDE itself is using the API to communicate with iTunes Connect when you uploading binaries (for instance).

It also can be used to:

  • upload app binaries
  • upload screenshots
  • update app metadata
  • manage app pricing
  • manage In-App Purchase products
  • etc.

Well yes, that’s basically the same possibilities than Application Loader, but scriptable.

How to use it?

Once it installed, let’s say that you have added it to you path, you can use the iTMSTransporter command and try to understand something to the help message.

There are basically 3 modes that can be easily translated into three steps, plus the one where you actually edit the information you want to send to iTunes Connect.

Step 1 : lookup for metadata

In my case, I had to find metadata related to a given In-App Purchase product identifier, so the first step is to download the .itmsp package from iTunes Connect with the following command:

iTMSTransporter -m lookupMetadata -u "$ITC_USERNAME" -p "$ITC_PASSWORD" -vendor_id "$ITC_PRODUCT_PARENT_ID"

Doing such will download a package (aka a directory that OS X will not open directly) with an XML file representing ALL THE DATA about your application. If you just need to update products one by one, you can easily add filters:

iTMSTransporter -m lookupMetadata -u "$ITC_USERNAME" -p "$ITC_PASSWORD" -vendor_id "$ITC_PRODUCT_PARENT_ID" -subitemids "$ITC_PRODUCT_ID" -subitemtype InAppPurchase

Step 2 : update metadata

This is the most challenging part since you need to update the metadata.xml file by adding or editing some fields.

As I was writing a shell script, I used xmlstarlet to work with my xml file. XPath…

Note 1: if you want to upload some files (screenshots, .ipa files or .pkg files), you just need to add them to the .itmsp package and update the related fields in the metadata.xml file (such as the size of the file, or the md5 hash).

Note 2: except some required field, all the non-modified fields are ignored, you can safely remove some of them.

Step 3 : verify

iTMSTransporter -m verify -u "$ITC_USERNAME" -p "$ITC_PASSWORD" -f "$ITMSP_PATH"

If this command pass, you can go to the step 4, otherwise, you should carefully read the hints “provided” by Apple in the error log.

Step 4 : upload

iTMSTransporter -m upload -u "$ITC_USERNAME" -p "$ITC_PASSWORD" -f "$ITMSP_PATH"

Note: when the upload is completed, the sent package may take some processing time to appear on iTunes Connect, especially when sending In-App Purchase packages.

Voila !

The documentation found on iTunes Connect if “helpful”, but here is the best source of information I found: http://bou.io/UploadingScreenshotsWithITMSTransporter.html, this is about uploading screenshots but the process can be easily adapted.