iOS app distribution with Visual Studio App Center

3 min readNov 25, 2020

In mobile development earlier the new version was released after a month or so but now the situation has been changed and the version updates are very often, sometimes it's with the gap of a day only. So the distribution center provides a reliable way to minimize the manual efforts to test, increment version, sign with certificates, create archives and distribute new builds among testers or to the App store.

In this article, you will get to know how to configure the App center for iOS app distribution. App center provides a faster way to the manual process by providing several services that are commonly used by mobile developers.

App center provides the following services

Build
Test
Distribute
Diagnostics(Issues/Crashes)
Analytics

Let's have a look at the steps to configure the build

Step 1: Add a new app

Add new app into your App Center with App name, Released type, OS, and platform

Step 2: Configure the Project Repository

Go to the Build option and select a service used for hosting your project repository

Step 3: Configure Project

Select your project from the list of all available projects on that service.

Note: You need an ‘Admin’ access for the selected service.

Step 4: After selecting the project, you will see the list of all available branches for the selected project.

Step 5: Select a branch to configure the frequent build. You can configure different builds for different branches.

Click on Configure build

Step 6: Configure The Build

Start configuring the build. Configure all parameters based on the project need.

Select the Xcode version you want to use to build your project.
You can add custom build scripts if required.

Post-clone: runs immediately after the repository was cloned but before we do anything else on our end.
Pre-build: runs before the actual build starts(used for React Native e.g npm install)
Post-build: runs After the build has finished or failed
Find sample build scripts here

3. Select build frequency either on-demand or automatic with every push.

4. Choose if you want to automatically increment the build number based on Build Id or Timestamp.

5. Turn the switch on if you want to execute XCTest tests.

6. Specify environment variables if needed.

7. Sign build with provisioning profiles and developers certificates.

8. Select If you want to test on real devices.

9. And finally set distribute build either in Groups or directly on Store.