Apple App Store Publishing

Building Your Application

1. We are using Expo Application Services(EAS) for building our application on both iOS and Android platforms. Firstly, we need to set it up on our local by the following command:

2. After installing eas, you need to sign up on Expo. (We are using Expo servers to build our apps on the cloud!) Here, you can sign up on Expo

3. After signing in/up on Expo, you need to run the command below to login on your local terminal to Expo so that we can push our mobile app to build on Expo Cloud. Login to Expo is pretty easy. All you need to do is to run the command below:

4. Now it is time to configure your project to EAS platform with the following command. This command will generate an eas.json file on your project's root(react-native-starter-mobile/eas.json)

5. After running the configuration command, you will see a react-native-starter-mobile/eas.json file generated in your codebase. We will be adding environment variables that we want to use in our mobile application in this file. In the boilerplate code, the existing environment variables areEXPO_PUBLIC_FIREBASE_ENDPOINT, EXPO_PUBLIC_REVENUECAT_APPLE_API_KEY, EXPO_PUBLIC_REVENUECAT_GOOGLE_API_KEY and EXPO_PUBLIC_ONESIGNAL_APP_ID but you can add new ones if needed.

6. After adding the environment variables as well, we are now ready to trigger a build with eas build command for iOS platform:

When you execute the eas command above, you will be prompted to answer your Apple Developer account credentials along with if you want Expo to create provisioning profile and Apple Distribution Certificate for you. If you let Expo do all that for you, it is all automatic but you can also manually generate them and provide if you wish.

Building your app on Expo Cloud might take some time. You can check the status of the deployment by running the command below and see the progress:

The output of the command will look like this:

7. After the build process gets completed on Expo side, you will be able to see the build output in the Expo platform like below:

Now you have the compiled version of your mobile app and it is time to submit your application to Apple App Store!

Submit To Apple App Store

Now that we have built our application on iOS platform, now it is time to submit it to Apple App Store with React Native Starter AI's publishing guide! 🚀

1. Run eas submit command like below in your terminal:

2. Terminal will ask you how you like to submit your application. We need to choose Select a build from EAS option like below because we already build our application on Expo Cloud.

3. After selecting the submit method like above, you will need to choose which build you want to submit like below. You need to choose the one at the top if you want to submit the latest build generated.

4. After that EAS will ask you to fill out your developer account credentials and once you fill them in; the submission will start like below:

5. After the submission is complete, you will be able to see your app in App Store Connect like below:

6. After you see your app along with the build on App Store Connect page of your developer account, you are ready to fill out the title, description and other fields. But please keep in mind React Native Starter AI's App Store Optimization(ASO) Docs while doing so :)