Creating a great app for the Apple ecosystem has evolved over the last few years from using Objective-C, to Swift and with the advent of SwiftUI things are getting easier and better. The tasks that developers need to consider around the actual development of the app are well-known: create a suitable build for the app, provide the build to testers and beta users who will help with finding issues, bugs or features that are almost there, but not quite. Finally, when all of that is done, the app needs to be made available to end users via a suitable distribution.
The tools that one may use for these steps are varied ranging from manual testing, through to the use of CI/CD tools to automate the cycle mentioned above. During WWDC 2021 Apple introduced a new cloud-based tool called Xcode Cloud to automate the cycle of build, test and distribute apps all done within Xcode. The tool is now widely available and the main prerequisite if to be a registered developer with Apple. Once you have that, setting up your pipeline is actually quite straightforward. In this post I go through the steps for this.
