Why is publishing an App so hard?

Testing it on your phone is one thing but to get it onto the app stores is insanely hard.

Can someone please explain.

This is android.
https://flutter.dev/docs/deployment/android

And ios is no better.
https://flutter.dev/docs/deployment/ios

 

Its actually easier now than it used to be. Getting an application listed, signed etc so that it is available publically via major app stores has and likely always will be a rather involved process.

I wouldnt say its difficult though, its just following a series of steps. Once youve done it one time its super easy as you just repeat the same steps every time.

None of the stuff being asked is out of the ordinary, its all stuff required by either the store or device. Stuff like app manifests etc are there for a reason and at least now a lot of it is auto generated, I remember having to write app manifest XMLs by hand back in the day and that sucked

 

True, still kills me though. I remember trying to get an apple dev license for fun and thinking this is way harder than it needs to be. Then desperately trying to work out where in xcode to assign it after hours of googling.

The android setup looks much worse (more involved).

I see dozens of mobile games in the WIP fairly simple IMHO, so it baffles me that they too must have gone through this process to just get it onto the stores.

In my head I thought it would just be

#1Compile the app for android + ios
#2 Login into google play / apple
#3 Upload and you're done.

Certainly not all this! But hey I'll give it a shot.

 

once you have registered, created store page and required images, its pretty easy after that..*

unity: increment version number, build apk
google play: manage release, add, upload, publish - done

unity ios: increment version number, build xcode
xcode: open project, archive, click upload
itunes connect: add release, select your upload (once its processed), send to review &publish - done
(xcode even automatically manages your certificates these days, it was nightmare before)



*except on ios builds you always have some build, submit or store error and never upgrade xcode, os or other tools on mac unless its required..

 

Cool can I pick your brains if I get stuck? I'm using Flutter btw but I just assumed the signing process would be similar inside unity.

 

yeah sure, i dont know what flutter is/does but rest of the store submission stuff should be same.

 

I published my first game on the Playstore some weeks ago and stumbled into the same problems. But thanks to Google and Unity it wasn’t so hard to solve them. Beside the signing I had to change also some other things to publish the game:

• the Playstore wants to have an App-Bundle (aab-file) rather than an APK file, therefore I had to install the Android NDK to create the App-Bundle file (you can use Unity Hub to install the NDK).

• the playstore doesn’t accept a x86 builds anymore so I had to disable the x86 architecture and enable the ARMv7 and ARM64 architecture.

• I had to switch the scripting backend to IL2CPP (I don’t remember exactly why but I’m thinking it was because of the changed architecture settings).

Hope this helps you

 

What part of this is hard, exactly? This is all pretty standard signing stuff.

Y'all are gonna S*** yourself if you ever try and put a game on Steam.

 

Why what does it involve in terms of technical hurdles? [Out of interest of course, not that I would consider putting a game on steam as it stands today]

 

Thanks but I'm making a prototype with Flutter so a lot of those things are not directly applicable to me. It might be easier or more difficult, won't know till I've tried

 

The entire depot and packaging system for Steam is about five times more work than what you're seeing on the App Store or Play, and backend service testing your game ends up being pretty complex, especially if you want to do things like ensure that demo/preview versions have cloud save compatibility with each other. Steam offers a great deal of fine grain control, which also means you have to handle near everything yourself.

 

Interesting, I suppose people with no experience come to this with rose tinted glasses and think the hardest part is making a working prototype on their dev machine. So have you released on steam and how long did the process take?
What hurdles did you face?

 

It is more applicable to a Unity forum than the problems you have with Flutter.

 

For the most part, I'm used to it, but recently I had to do a whole runaround because sometimes the depot creation fails and simply won't grant you access to publish builds. Ended up having to have a bunch of things reset by Valve staff to get my stuff to work.

When you're working on Steam, always make sure you have a document detailing your important details, otherwise you'll have to do a lot of work over again if anything goes wrong. I was lucky that I learned that lesson years ago.

 

I agree for the most part it is ridiculously difficult. There's an entire learning curve just relating to trying to get everything set up for publishing. Weird manifest files and settings and special steps to take and all this weird apple stuff hoops and boops you have to go through. It's far too complicated and longwinded. Apple should work with Unity to create a custom publishing wizard or something that just has to enter the minimal required information and hit a button to submit it. But note you also have to do all this stupid device provisioning and setting up developer account users and permissions and stuff, it's very offputting. I went through it once but probably took at least a few days to figure out how to do it, scraping together facts and tips from various places. Even better, have the user skip anything relating to xcode whatsoever and just hit publish inside unity. Done.

 

I remember seeing unity was working on a app submission service. Just found it via google but looks like they don't have the 2 most important stores. Wonder if they ever will cause it would be nice....

https://unity.com/unity-distribution-portal

 

Uploading is all done via the command line. There is a GUI, but that just writes a batch file for you. You still need to understand the command line structure. Then the system is sometimes buggy. First time around its hard to know if you made a mistake, or if the system is broken. On top of that the Steam system of depots and packages isn't super intuitive, and the web interface to manage all of these isn't great. And of course its all hidden behind a NDA, so you can't just go watch a YouTube video on how the process works.

None of this is a deal breaker. Once you are used to the process its fairly straight forward. Trouble is very few people are uploading games to steam at a high enough frequency to get used to the process. So you basically have to relearn it each time you upload.

 

Demand is very high to get your app on these stores, which are monopolies on their respective platforms. Demand for the platforms themselves shows little sign of dropping, and there is virtually no new competition entering the market to upset their platform dominance.

Add all that up it means Apple and Google have no incentive to make the app submission process easier. In fact they have every incentive to make it more difficult, allowing the process itself to deter casual not that serious entries into their stores.

 

You can't build for app store on anything except mac. And you can't use anything except xcode to compile the ipa.

Which makes whole thing impossible. Apple proprietary policy is trash-tier enforced garbage that keeps it floating. And a whole bunch of money bags ofc.

Otherwise ios would drown the same way symbian did.

 

Thanks for the advice guys very insightful. I think it is like all things, once you’ve done it once it probably doesn’t seem so daunting.

 

Just try and remember the first time you opened unity compared to how at home you likely feel in it now Everything starts somewhere!