I’ve always wanted to learn about iOS dev and 2023 is the year that I am going to tackle it seriously so that I can develop tools for myself and maybe even share them with others for free in the Apple Store. I will start a blog series to chronicle my learning to build my first app.
Here are the first few steps that I need to do to set up my development environment:
- Find a Mac (this is easy since we use Mac for work)
- Register an Apple Developer membership (to deploy to iOS devices and also to sell in the store)
- Install XCode
- Verify that I can run the app on my machine (Since I have followed an amazing tutorial to create a FlappyBird using Unity, I used it to verify my iOS dev setup. )
Step 1: Go to https://developer.apple.com/ and pay around $99 + tax to sign up for a year
- What is the Apple Developer program
- $99 a year + tax
- Membership includes all the tools, resources, and support you need to develop and distribute apps, including access to beta software, app services, testing
- For more info on what’s include, see https://developer.apple.com/programs/whats-included/
- Once sign up for the membership, you can download the profile, or automatically detect the profile from Xcode (like I did in step 2)
Step 2: Install XCode
- What is XCode?
- Xcode consists of a suite of tools that developers use to build apps for Apple
- XCode is free but only run on Mac
Step 3: Connect my iPhone 14 to XCode
When running the sample app to test run on my iPhone, I ran into an error prompting me to turn on Developer Mode. When I check my iPhone’s Settings->Privacy and Security, I did not see any Developer Mode option. I had to disconnect and reconnect my iPhone via USB, restart XCode, and re-run the “Run” on the device to see the Developer Mode on my phone. It’s pretty tedious, but I think it’s to prevent users from accidentally turning on the Developer Mode.
Once the Developer Mode was enabled on my iPhone, I had to wait for about 3-5 min for XCode to “fetch the debug symbols” from my phone.
After the symbols are fetched, the Unity app was successfully downloaded to my device and started running
This is where I ran into a bit of an issue. Since I’ve upgraded to iOS 16, the Developer Mode is hidden. I had to
Click to show the test Unit Project started on my iPhone (recording from my iPhone)
http://shallwelearn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/RPReplay_Final1675030509.mov
