Just over a week ago today, I released my first app to the iOS App Store. If you’re really curious, you can find it here.

Spoiler: it requires an Apple Music subscription to really work.

I have a 1.1 coming soon with some bug fixes and improvements from my small TestFlight community. Send me a message/email/smoke signal if you want to be on future beta tests.

It’s really freeing to be so unknown that I can release something that I’m not entirely happy with and not feel a large amount of stress over it. Maybe one day that will change. Here’s hoping.

P.S. here’s the little website I made for the app.

I’m working on an iOS app and I’m getting so close to releasing the 1.0. I was looking at App Store Connect and noticed that I needed screenshots and I remembered that Fastlane has the ability to automate screenshot creation.

Pretty cool I think. So I go through the process of setting up and starting to work on the UI Tests that need to run in order to trigger the screens I want to show and then it hits me.

The app I’m working on uses MusicKit and unfortunately the Xcode Simulators aren’t able to really do anything with MusicKit i.e. they can’t search or play music which is kind of a big deal. This hadn’t been much an issue during development because I could just run the app on my phone.

From what I can tell I will not be able to use Fastlane to automate this screenshot creation because it relies on using simulators for running the UI Tests that would then capture screenshots. What a bummer (though I sure hope I’m wrong!).

Fortunately I found another resource from Benoit Pasquier that might make it possible for me to use UI Tests to automate screenshots to some degree. It won’t be quite as extensive, but my wife has a regular sized iPhone and I have a big one so at least I’ll have two sets of screenshots. No luck on the iPhone SE size. Hopefully that isn’t a dealbreaker, but we’ll see. This is all very new to me.

This is my first time writing (re: rambling) about this app and if you’d like to hear more or be invited to the TestFlight, feel free to comment on this post or shoot me an email at nick_kaczmarek@icloud.com.

Cheers 🥂