Coming Soon: “iOS App Distribution & Best Practices” Book

I’m happy to announce that I’m working on a new book with the raywenderlich.com team. I find it hard to believe that the last book I co-authored, Core Data by Tutorials, came out six years ago. I’ve felt the itch to work on a new book for a couple of years, specifically on the topic of app distribution, and I’m happy that it’s finally happening.

The working title for the new book is iOS App Distribution & Best Practicesand it is going to cover everything you have to do after you’re done coding. Like Core Data (less so now than in 2014), the road to getting your app in your users’ hands is paved with gotchas and frustration. Anyone who has wrestled with code signing or who has had to deal with an App Store rejection knows this.

The book will cover all the usual suspects like certificate management, code signing, provisioning profiles, entitlements, Testflight and app review. After you’ve learned how all of the basic blocks work (and why it’s hard to work with them), the book will move on to best practices like deploying internal builds, creating custom Xcode build configurations and connecting everything up to a CI/CD system. If this sounds like something you want to know more about, this book is for you.

I’ve wanted this book to exist ever since I started working as an iOS developer. Back when I first learned iOS development, I started out by building an app for a college course. I developed and demoed it primarily on the simulator and when it came time to put it on my iPhons 4S so I could bring it with me to interviews, I vividly remember spending an entire dayfiguring out app identifiers and provisioning profiles and code signing. The whole thing was foreign and confusing back then and it has not gotten much better.

I’m also incredibly excited and energized by the team that’s working on the book with me, which includes my co-author Keegan Rush and our excellent editors Manda Frederick, Soheil Azarpour, Jayven Nhan and Jordan Osterberg. Over the last six years, the process of writing a book for raywenderlich.com has improved and evolved a lot! Instead of writing in isolation, the process is highly collaborative. I can only describe it as the feeling you get when you’re part of a good scrum team. I can’t wait for the book to come out.