How to Submit Your App to the App Store (2020)

hey code crew on this channel I talk a lot about how to build apps but I've never really explained what happens after your app is built how do you get your app into the App Store what is the Apple Developer Program and what does Apple require you to do in order to pass their certification process I'll answer all of these questions for you in this video so stay tuned hi my name is Chris Ching and if this is your first time here welcome to code with Chris where we teach you how to make an app now before we dive in I have a quick question for you do you want to have an app in the App Store and if so do you have a date for when you want to do that by let me know by leaving a quick comment below and on your way down don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more awesome videos all right now let's go over a high-level overview of the process for submitting your app to the App Store there are three parts to this equation number one the provisioning profile number two App Store connect and number three Xcode now let's dive a little deeper into each of these parts and see what role they play in the overall process number one the provisioning profile now when it comes to apps provisioning has to do with identity and permissions each app has to be tied back to a known developer be installed on a known device and also have the proper permissions to access all of the services that is trying to use such as cloudkit Game Center and so on all of this information is stored in what's called a provisioning profile or just profile for short now the actual process for creating a provisioning profile for your app is pretty straightforward but it does take a little bit of explanation so I'm going to save that for a dedicated video for now I just want you to realize that before you submit your app to the App Store it must have a valid provisioning profile number two what is App Store Connect App Store Connect is the website where you submit and manage your apps in the App Store once you log into the App Store connect website you can do things like create a brand new App Store listing or manage your existing app store listings check your app analytics check your sales on financial reports and also had your banking information so that you can get paid alright number three what is Xcode well if you've gotten to this point where you're about to submit your app then you better know what Xcode is once you've finished building your app and testing it in Xcode then what you can do is create an archive of your app which is basically a bundle or a package that contains all of your code and resources that you can then submit to the app store Connect website and this is actually done through Xcode now that you know the three components in the process let's step over the actual process step by step so you can see how this happens here's how the process looks you build and you test your app in Xcode once it's ready to go you get a provisioning profile for it that identifies you as the developer you go to App Store connect and you create an app store listing with things like the title description and screenshots then you go back to Xcode you create an archive of your app and you submit it to App Store connect then you log back into the App Store Connect website you review your App Store listing information together with the app archive that you submitted earlier you submit everything to the Apple certification team for review they're going to make sure that your app follows all the AppStore guidelines meets a quality threshold and doesn't contain any restricted content I'll link to the App Store guidelines below the video then you just sit back and wait in a day or two you're going to hear back from the team whether you pass or fail if you've passed congratulations your app is going to be live in the App Store within 24 hours if you've specified that you want to release it as soon as possible if you want to release it at a future date you can be rest assured that it's already passed and it will go live on the date that you specify however if you've failed then the certification team will usually give you a reason and what to fix and then you just go ahead and fix those things and resubmit it for review now there's one important thing I need to mention and that is the Apple Developer Program you see unlike Android in order to submit apps to the Apple App Store you do need to enroll in their Apple Developer Program it's $99 a year and what it gives you access to is the App Store Connect website so without enrolling in this program you can't really get your apps into the Apple App Store but don't worry Apple actually gives you a lot of tools to get your app into tip-top shape without having to enroll into this program and once you get to that point where you do want to get your app into the App Store that's when you can enroll in the Apple Developer Program so now I want to walk you through actually submitting your app in a more realistic scenario so while I'm not gonna actually submit my app I'm gonna show you all of the steps so let's pretend that what I have here on my screen is my finished app I've finished building it I finished testing it it's ready to go the first thing I want to make sure that you do is that you are a member of the Apple Developer Program because otherwise you won't get access to submit your app now if you are then take note of the Apple ID that you use to sign up for the program and under Xcode preferences make sure that you have that Apple ID added here because you're going to need to select it in order to publish your app from Xcode next if you have that added go into your project properties by clicking here and then under signing and capabilities under the team you're going to want to select that Apple ID that you that is connected to your Apple Developer Program and then take note of your bundle identifier because this uniquely identifies your app here so I would actually copy it right now because we're going to need that next step we're not going to jump into App Store connect just yet we're going to need to go to the developer portal now this is another place that you only get access to if you're part of the Apple Developer Program you're going to want to go under identifiers and these are your app identifiers it's going to uniquely identify your project here go ahead click plus you're going to register a new app ID and then under bundle ID you're just going to paste that bundle ID from your project right there choose explicit because it is not a wild card platformer pretty straightforward description you have to put something there so we're gonna do a quiz that tests and then capabilities if your app uses any of these things then you're gonna want to enable them here otherwise click continue confirm your information that you selected and hit register now you're going to see it somewhere here so this is the one that I just did quiz app test now you can go to the App Store Connect website I would refresh the page right now just because your app ID might not show up otherwise click my apps and you're gonna see all the apps that you have either not all of these are actually live in the App Store but you see all your apps here click the plus icon in the upper left click new app and this is where you're gonna want to make sure you can select the app ID that you just added so click this drop down so I don't see the quiz app test ID that i just added here that's why I mentioned we should refresh the page sometimes it just takes a little bit so I'm gonna refresh the page again let's try that again new app Renaldi and there it is quiz app test this is the one that I just added so select that choose your language just gonna choose the English US select your platform quiz test and you're gonna have to add a SKU now this is only for your internal use so you can call it anything you want if you've got a large catalog of apps then you might want to put some more thought into your SKU and make sure that there's some sort of system for you to identify your apps and differentiate between your various apps now user access this is not referring to general users this is actually referring to the people who have access to your app store Connect account because there are different roles that can have access to this account if you're a single person then this doesn't really apply but imagine if you were a bigger company you'd have your developer maybe your designer your publisher your accountant for this it's just saying if you want to limit the access or you want just full access any role can see the app I think for most people who are watching this and for myself included we're gonna be selecting full access now let's create this app listing okay so let's see what here ah you can't have any spaces there let's see let's say here is already being used so I'm just gonna because I've done this a couple of different times so we can have a smooth video so that's why it's not allowed you need to select the same thing anyways I'm just gonna do quiz up test two and we're gonna create it for you you're not going to run into this problem alright so now we're at the point where we have to enter a ton of information for our App Store listing just to make sure that you know it's available in all the regions that it shows up for various searches things like that so let's go through it the first thing that I think will take a lot of people by surprise as this one privacy policy URL like you have to tell the users who are going to download your app how you're going to use their information so it's gonna be a link in your app store listing that's going to lead to you know whole wall of text telling them how their information is gonna be used I think for most people they developers I mean they don't think about that they have to tell people this and so if you actually just Google app privacy policy there's gonna be a ton of tools and examples for you to to use and to draw inspiration from to create your own privacy policy and obviously you're gonna have to mold it to your exact scenario right if you you know are using their email address for in a database or you're gonna you know stuff like that you're gonna have to outline in your policy how exactly you're gonna use their information you can't just copy someone's and then use that because it won't really apply to your situation in your app so I think it's okay to draw inspiration someone else's privacy policies and there are a lot of examples you can find as well but you're gonna have to make it specific and relevant to your app and then after you have that you're gonna want to make it live on some sort of URL that you can link to from your app store listing and if you have your own website or you have an a website for your app then that's perfect you can just set up a page and paste the privacy policy there and then put the URL right here but if you don't have a website you're gonna need to find some sort of hosting where you can set up a web page with your privacy policy and paste that you're out there you can try using a Facebook page if they don't like that you can always just find something else but you can start with that I mean that's free that's great another solution is github pages you can use as free Wix as well has a sort of free ad-supported plan which you can put up your privacy policy and link to that it it's gonna have ads on it so it might not look as professional as you'd like but you know you can always edit this so this will just at least get you through the process to submit your app and get it get it reviewed and get it live so don't let this kind of block you you know all right so we have the name the subtitle we have some this bundle ID you won't have to change you don't have to change any of this stuff selecting a category is important so this is pretty self-explanatory if it's a game you know you have all these different app store categories now I'm not gonna go through exactly like how to optimize your app store listing you can search App Store optimization or ASO and there would be tons of guides and tutorials for you on how to make sure your app gets the most exposure how to put keywords how to find the relevant keywords for your app and maybe what the correct categories are to choose that's not something that I'm an expert in right now so I'm not going to pretend to give you advice on that just Google App Store optimization and there's a ton of guides my good friend Steve Young over at at masters calm is an absolute guru at this stuff so go check him out for this sort of thing that's who I go to and who I use as well now at the top here there are a couple of different other tabs so let's check it out features in here in-app purchases or App Store promotions Game Center all of this stuff you would do through here I'm not going to go through that test flight is something where if you want to send your app out for a group of beta testers to test they don't have a group of beta testers for you but you can set up your app here so that you can send a link to like say your friends and family members and they can download your app and try it out and give you feedback and tell you how they're crashing your app and anything like that so that's where you would set up this sort of stuff and the it's called test flight this used to be a separate company but because it worked so well Apple bought them and they've integrated test flight into their process here so let's look under activity this is where actually your your builds are gonna be buy builds I mean your actual app bundle so your code your resources here this is going to get turned into an archive and that is going to get uploaded to App Store connect and you're going to see that right here in the future when you create updates to your app you're going to change the version number under general here and it's update the build number or version number depending on what sort of scheme you want to use and how you want to keep track of that stuff you know you have total freedom but when you release a new version it's got to be and you have to increment the build number or the version number for it to be a new version and that's how you're going to identify between your different builds so we're gonna go through this in a second but let's walk through filling out the rest of the information for your App Store listing so these are the builds that have been uploaded from Xcode the App Store versions right here these are the ones that are actually being submitted to the App Store and ratings and reviews right here so this one this yellow circle means that it's currently on hold and preparing for submission that's what we're doing now so this is us right here this is what we're doing today version 1.0 all right let's go back to the app store and go to pricing and availability pretty self-explanatory you have to have at least the pricing tier even if it's free you choose free from here and then there's a bunch of different other options here that are pretty self-explanatory that I won't go through so let's click on this version number 1.0 prepare for submission this is the current build that we're working on so for this one you're going to want to upload a bunch of different screenshots of your app for different devices so if it's available on iPad then you're gonna submit screenshots for iPad as well otherwise you're gonna just submit the screenshots for the two iPhones now there are two different sets of screenshots depending on the screen size now there are some links here for you to get the exact sizes for all of the screenshots that you're going to upload now down here in the corner you can see that you can submit up to ten screenshots and up to three app preview videos these videos they kind of take a little more effort to make but personally when I find that I'm looking through apps and deciding whether or not I want to download them I usually if there's an app preview video and I like it I'm Way more highly likely to download it if it's just screenshots and I don't like what I see I might not even download it so I think it's in your best interest to create an app preview video that's personally what I think I don't know if that's kind of the absolute truth or not ask yourself when you're browsing the app store how you tend to decide whether or not you're going to download an app and go from there now I do want to mention that there are tools out there that make it easy for you to create these screenshots because it is quite a hassle it does take a bit of time so what you would do essentially is you would launch your app in the simulator and then from the simulator you would take a screenshot just press command S and it saves a PNG screenshot on to your desktop and then what you do is upload them to here the thing is if you notice the App Store screenshots in your App Store app listings some of them can get pretty fancy it's not enough just to show screens of your app but what people do is they above the screenshot they will put text kind of telling people as they're looking at those screenshots what the special features are and why they would want to download that app like how's that app going to tell them so there's often text overlaid on those screenshots and of course you can bring those screenshots into Photoshop and you can add that text yourself or you can use third-party tools that make it easy like one of them being da Vinci apps now I've personally spoken with the owner Nikita through email and I think what he's got here is a pretty cool tool so let me just quickly show you how to use it so for example I would do quiz test here and then I would edit the project and I would create a screenshot package and it it basically helps you create these screenshots really easily so I'm creating let's say for the 6.5 screen I'm going to go click next and then next I'm going to be able to choose what type of screen shot I want what sort of style so maybe I'll choose this one right here go to design they can pick a design for it and then I can directly drag those screenshots that I took from my simulator drag them into here and I don't have any to show you right now but if I did you would just drag it in here it upload it and you would see your screenshot in this app device frame and then you could write some text over here so you would say some sort of highlight some feature new feature or something like that I'm not very creative right now I'd save that and then you can then add another screenshot and you can do the same thing you can select a different color you could write a different text new feature number two and then you would drop a different screenshot up here and then you would so on and so forth create different ones and then once you're done once you've created all of the screenshots that you need you would then go preview an export and it would just give you a zip to download all of these images and then you would go back to your App Store connect and you would just upload them so pretty simple I would recommend using a tool like that and see what else so that takes care of the screenshots here you've got the keywords now these keywords will dictate how your app will show up depending on what people type into the App Store for search if they're searching for like let's say fitness or to-do app or something like that you'd want to put those sorts of keywords this goes back to App Store optimization you're gonna want to read up on how to find the best keywords for your app to make it discoverable all of this information I want to note that you can change it in the future so don't feel like what you're putting here is set in stone but however for an app launch you do want to put your best foot forward so let me just say that support URL this could simply be a URL to a Facebook page I think that's the simplest thing if you don't have an app website then create an a Facebook page for your app and just put that URL here that's the URL that will also show up in your listing if people need help they they want some support for your app that's where they're gonna go marketing URL this one's optional but this would be to your website if you have one or two your app page again now this is your app store description so you're going to want to fill this out and then this promo text is maybe you're running a sale like a Christmas sale or Halloween sale this is where you put that text and you can change this text without submitting a new app update which is really nice if you have complimentary add-ons to your app like an iMessage or Apple watch part to your app that's where you'd put it here and then this builds here we saw a little bit of that under activity but this is where you would select your build that you've uploaded from Xcode you know it's show up here and you're gonna select the build that you want for your version one app store release this is where you would select that you don't see anything here for me because I haven't uploaded any builds okay I'm gonna show you how to do that in a sec so you're gonna choose your App Store icon you're gonna set the version this copyright is just like a little line so you can just they get even give you an example here so you do like 20 20 or 20 19 code with Kris Inc or whatever your company or personal name is now this this information here is always confusing to me but if you just read the little text here it just says that this information will be appearing on the Korean app store so you can just fill that out now this part right here is for the certification team the person who is going to be reviewing your app to make sure that it fits the App Store guidelines and that it doesn't have any explicit content and so on and so forth this information is for them so that's gonna be helpful to fill out any notes on how to use the app in general what I was just say is try to make their life easy provide whatever information is necessary to do that if your app requires a login I would create a login for them with some dummy data so that you know you could provide that login here when they log in with that demo user they're going to have enough data to see what the app is like to go through that experience you want to make it easy for them remember because they're going to be the one giving either the seal of approval that you pass or to reject your app and tell you what to change so you're gonna want to make them happy and then I always end up with thank you for your time you know thank you for spending the time for reviewing my app just thanking them I think goes a long way because it's not an easy job in my mind now version release you do want to manually release it after it's been passed or do you want to automatically release it right away or do you want to release it at some date you know so that's where you can choose that and then after you save this information finally you can hit this submit for review button so that's the general process actually one thing I forgot so after you set up all this information you save it you technically cannot submit it for release just yet because we haven't uploaded the build from Xcode right so at this point you'd go back to Xcode then up here you would select generic iOS device instead of selecting a simulator so that you're saying that you want to create a build that can be deployed on a generic iOS device then go up to product and click archive and what this is going to do is create that app bundle that is going to get uploaded to the App Store connect after you create an archive you're going to see that archive in your organizer window so I'm gonna open this up show you what that looks like so here you have an archives tab or section you're gonna see it's it's gonna appear right here and then you're going to want to click distribute app and you're gonna choose app store connect and then you're go through this wizard and it's going to upload the build and it's gonna show up right here for you you're just gonna refresh the page select that build for version 1 of your app and then click Submit for review and then you just wait a couple of days if you fail if your app gets rejected for any reason don't worry you're just gonna look at their feedback correct any errors that might have and then resubmit it for review again you know and if you pass on the first try congratulations right your app is going to be in the App Store so that's the general process of how to submit your app to the App Store did you like the video if you want to see more videos about building and submitting apps into the App Store make sure you hit that subscribe button below and turn on notifications so that you don't miss the next video when it comes out in the next couple of days finally don't forget to tell me whether or not you want to submit an app into the App Store simply leave me a comment below yes or no all right thanks for watching I'll see you in the next lesson

Channel: CodeWithChris

Views: 371,102

Keywords: how to put an app on the app store, submit app to app store, how to submit an app to the app store, submit your app to app store, submit an app to apple store, how to submit an app to apple store, app store connect, provisioning profile, ios apps, app store, apple app store, publish an app, publish an app on app store, itunes connect, how to upload an app to the app store, upload an app, submit an app to the app store

Id: YPLs3xrDcm0

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019