Friday, October 14, 2011

Pains of iOS 5.0 from a developer perceptive

We needed to test our app under iOS 5.0 so I began that process yesterday.

Step 1: Download and install new iTunes
Success - no issues

Step 2: Connect iTouch Rev 4, install iOS 5.0
Success - but blew away everything on device. I only use it to test, not a big deal.

Step 3: Install and run app on iTouch
Failure - Xcode does not know about iOS 5.0 devices so it refused to install. I find this to be stupid as the target of device of the code is 3.0.

Step 4: Download and install Xcode 4.2 for Snow Leopard
Success / Failure - Takes a long time to get it but it installed. Install works but it blows away all SDK version prior to 4.0. I can't test with a 3.2 simulator at this point. Xcode 4.2 has some new warnings that are valid. I fix those issues in the code while I am fixing the iOS 5.0 issue.

Step 5: Install app on iTouch
Success - it now will install

Step 6: Test app on iTouch
Failure - it crashes because some really old code is using NSIndexPath passed to didSelectRowAtIndex path call later. I need to copy and retain the data to solve the issue. Never a good programming idea in Objective C to think any variable passed to you will hang around. No other version of iOS cared about this particular one. Could be they fixed some things to get ready for dual core processing or other threading issues.

Step 7: Check in changes
Failure - Xcode "sees" SVN for a brief second then gets lost. Use IntelliJ AppCode to check in changes. Find out I need put the URL to our instance of SVN into Safari. Safari bitches about certificate but I can tell it to stop bitching then Xcode starts to work. Xcode SVN interaction has always been spotty at best and again it bites me in the behind.

Step 8: Archive for app submission
Failure - Xcode can't find my deployment provisioning profile. Delete profiles, refresh, rebuild,  restart Xcode, pray, etc. Something finally works and I can set the deployment area to the proper profile. Archive menu item is disabled. Search Google and remember that you must select iOS Device as target for this to be enabled. Remember how stupid that is from the last time this happened to me so many months ago.

Step 9: Validate
Failure - Message tells me it can't find the app in iConnect. Google the message and see that I have to have the app in "waiting to upload" state before it will validate it. Next step will be for the boss to do that so I can try again.

Step 10: Test on iTouch without iOS 5.0
Failure - By default Apple has decided that anyone not running on a armv7 device should just throw the worthless piece of crap in the trash and give them more money. Connect device, press RUN and all you get is a message that it finished running on the device even though it did not install or run. No error, no console, no help - thanks Apple. You have to open up the build settings and add armv6 back into the supported architectures then it will run on the device just fine. If you only test with the simulators you would not find this issue as the simulator is i386 architecture and I was able to run all the way back to 4.0 using that. After installing Xcode 4.2 you would be hosed unless you tested on physical devices.

Step 11: Submit to store
Success - Once the boss got the app in "ready to submit" mode I was able to validate and submit it without any issues. The error message was stupid. We also put up new screen shots for both the iPhone and iPad.

Step 12: Released to market
Success - It only took Apple two days. I was expecting 10. Kudos to Apple for cranking this one out. Last time it took 7 days and I figured they would be swamped. We did put in the notes that it was an iOS 5.0 fix being released. Between that and small download count I am sure they just pushed it through figuring if we screwed the pooch on this one it would come back to haunt our users and us but not really Apple.

A huge waste of time this has been. What you need to do is not obvious. The new updates from Apple are not friendly and blow away or break things. Apple is rather developer hostile. I need to get the app submitted to the market as it is broken under iOS (our fault, not Apples fault). With a rash of people submitting to Apple right now for iOS 5.0 who knows how long I will be in the queue. All our current users who upgrade will be hosed. This is a huge failing of the Apple Store. I will not be able to get a couple of line fix out to our customers in a timely manner.

Xcode continues to be a very annoying IDE. If this is what Apple considers a good UI and user friendly then I don't want to know what they are like when they are mad at me.

2 comments:

  1. XCode3 and 4 can live together on the same machine.
    Just rename old 'developer/' to 'developer3/' and you are ready to install XCode4.

    ReplyDelete
  2. funkyboy,

    I have no desire to run Xcode 3. I used it for the first part of the project some time back and found it super limiting. I really enjoy having tab based editing and some of the other features of 4.

    ReplyDelete