Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By : Doron Katz
Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By: Doron Katz

Overview of this book

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
www.PacktPub.com
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Development distribution overview


Before this chapter goes into what provisioning profiles are, it is important to understand how an app is distributed at a high level. The Member Center, or developer portal, as this book refers to it, is a paid developer program that developers enroll in to be able to gain the privilege to distribute apps to devices for testing, as well as for publishing to the App Store.

The following diagram illustrates the path a developer takes in three phases:

  • Enroll
  • Develop
  • Distribute

Enrollment

The first thing a developer will need to do is enroll in the Apple Developer Program (https://developer.apple.com/programs/), paying a nominal yearly fee of $99 USD. In return, Apple provides the developer with access to the developer portal and iTunes Connect. Enrolled developers also gain access to the latest beta releases of Xcode, as well as pre-release iOS operating system releases, before the public has access.

Developers have three types of memberships (https://developer.apple...