Building via Cloud Build for a release on iOS and settings won't go through

Hi,

A bit frustrated here so I apologize in advance.

I followed the guide here and it got me far enough so I could get a cloud build for iOS. My problem was that I got a build with a iOS Development certificate. I would like to upload a build to the testflight so I tried to use the Application Loader on my Mac computer and it gives me an error saying: "ERROR ITMS-90161: "Invalid Provisioning File... Missing code-signing certificate... A Distribution Provisioning profile should be used..."" At this point I'm lost already.

Why do I need a distributor license to upload a test build?

Ok at this point I decide to do everything with my iOS Distributor certificate. Now here's where Unity leaves me hanging and I started losing my patience. I go into Unity. I follow the guide again and I set everything up. I put my bundle id, fill all the information in and this time of course I select the .mobileprovision and .p12 files that belong to my iOS Distributor license and add my password that I created for it.

Now... the Service window is completely stuck at the Credentials page and won't submit the information as it's stuck in "Saving...".

What am I supposed to do? Anyone came across this issue? Help much much appreciated.

 

There's an issue when doing this in Unity - what's happening is the website has a popup that asks you to confirm that you want to use distribution certificate because those can't be tested on devices (without going through App Store Connect and TestFlight). However in the Unity Editor, this popup is never displayed, but the sequence that their backend uses must be waiting for the confirmation, so the process never finishes. To get around this issue, setup your build target on the website instead of in Unity.

 

You must be talking about this one.

You're an angel. Thank you so much!

Unity please fix this issue I lost two days on this.

PS: I still don't know why I need a distribution license to upload a test build. Any idea regarding that?

 

That's an Apple thing - to upload to the App Store Connect you need to use a distribution license. If you just want to install it on any old device (assuming the device is included in your provisioning profile), you can use a developer certificate. When using that type, to get your app onto a device you either have to plug the device into the computer and manually push it from XCode onto the device, or you can distribute it using an app distributor - UCB is nice enough to be one of those, you can send people the QR code it generates and they can install the app, again though, the devices have to be in the provisioning profile. I've also used AppBox in the past, which uses your Dropbox account to distribute the apps (https://getappbox.com/).

Side note - this is why developing for Apple is such a pain - there's so many different types of certificates and profiles and combinations of them, and then certain builds won't work with certain combinations of certificates/profiles and/or the builds will expire after 90 days, 6 months, or a year (or even less if you have a certificate or provisioning profile that is about to expire). Want to build an app and test it really quickly? Well good luck, you either have to go through the process of adding your devices to a profile (and there's a limit of 100 devices AND you can't remove devices for a year after adding them), or you have to go through the App Store Connect - which takes upwards of 2 hours to process your builds before you can send them to TestFlight, and if you want to send a build to someone outside your organization, Apple actually has to APPROVE your app for beta testing. It's a huge hassle.

For Android, you just do a build and you can literally email the APK file to anyone you want.

/end rant.

Edit: Yes that is the popup I was talking about. And glad I could help!