Okay, this process was an example of easier said than done. First of all the project was in no way prepared to be released on iOS. so that has to come first and hopefully make a successful build first. Just to get the game running in the platform without crashing. From there bugs and features can be ironed out fairly easily, at least that what I was thinking at the moment, and boy how wrong was I.

All the SDKs I was using were all outdated, for the current version and mandate to stay with the Apple standard. Despite this minor inconveniences, as a developer you really have to give props to Apple for really making their apps amazingly optimized, I mean it’s so optimized you can’t even joke about it. Not just the optimization but the whole process getting your app on iOS was really written down, with all the quality checks. This kinda worries me though, as the release for apple has to come way slower but of better quality.

The build, succeeded in Xcode 11.5, finally the app is on iOS, you open it and it crashed. Oh boy, at least the build was there. Now to find why it’s crashing on startup. Here come the SDK compatibility issues with CocoaPods. Basically, all SDK needs to be updated to the latest versions. So I did, and oh god, the amount of errors has been rather alarming I think is the better word for this. The SDK versions in my app are not the same on CocoaPods, thus the breaking begins. I managed to get the version right. and built it again, yes it’s not crashing. it’s not crashing doesn’t mean it’s working right as well.

Anyway, I tried to submit a build, and hey hey surprise, the version of the game engine I’m using has a bug specifically for uploading your build to app store connect. and it’s present across all yearly Iteration. the latest version doesn’t mean the bug was not there as well. and upgrading a project is one of the most infrequent things you want to do. As the stability of the project should come first. Had to find a stable build with vouching of the bug fixed, easily enough one the comments stated a version with a few upvotes. I guess this is legit enough. Back up the project and try to upgrade.

It doesn’t end there. After upgrading, literally everything breaks, a lot of the SDK has been deprecated in this version, So I literally have to migrate all SDKs to their latest versions and make sure the Android version builds first. As you can see, fixing one thing breaks everything, what is not to love about development. The weird thing is, a lot of the SDK has redundancies with previous version DLL files. That’s another roadblock and honestly, you don’t want to touch those. We go to our back up and start over. I managed to get a successful running build on Android about 3 more tries and starting the SDK upgrade process over and over. And again we are now ready to try and port to build for the app store connect. hopefully, we can get an iOS release within the next few months.