iPhone app distribution made easy - Part 3

Now that we've built the distributions with xcodebuild it seems a shame to use Finder to compress the app bundle for submission to the App Store.

So lets use the "zip" command line utility to compress the app bundle:

zip -r -T -y "myApp_AppStoreDistribution.zip" "myApp.app"

The important option to note here is the "-y" option that stores symbolic links as the link. This is important because the app bundle contains symbolic links to the code signature folder.

If the symbolic links don't exist the application will not be accepted and iTunesConnect will complain with an error like:

The binary you uploaded was invalid. The signature was invalid, or it was not signed with an Apple submission certificate...

Now all that is left for us to do is formalize the build process and we're good to go. Next time I'll introduce the continuous integration engine called Hudson.