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It's 2022 and there's still no official way to deploy to the store through CICD

Sam Dumont
over 2 years ago

I can't wrap my mind around it. The developer experience is really bad and I don't know how or where to provide that feedback so I'll rant here. I took over the development of a power based workout datafield months ago, the original author is not really active anymore so I have to find workarounds to update. This is for an app with 2.5K downloads and 4.8 stars, niche but critical for people who want to use Stryd and the regular workout calendar, I get pinged quite a lot when new devices gets out.

Since there's no way to transfer ownership of applications, he was nice enough to store everything needed to sign and login to CIQ in the CICD secrets, I also build a small script to deploy by mimicking the login process. It fails most of the time, but sometimes cloudflare is nice enough to not block me and I can upload the new version.

I saw that a discussion about this problem was posted 3 years ago, how is this still not resolved ? Not providing this (and not providing a way to share ownership of applications) is killing open source or collaborative development... I could not update the datafield to support FR955 for weeks because I had issues with my login script, and now I can't add a new features because cloudflare blocks my script.

Doing things automatically from a CICD pipeline is modern app development 101, I don't get why it's not possible :(

  • over 2 years ago in reply to waterkip

    Today, you can't update an app in the store unless you use the original key.  I forget which app, but Garmin lost the key for one of their apps, and they had to do a new app with a new key.  Even Garmin didn't have a way around it.

  • over 2 years ago

    I think the key would have to go with the ownership. I think that's probably the way it works in Google Play as well. So if you thought about this and created a separated key for each app then you could transfer the ownership of any of them. If you used the same key then you can send the key to the new owner and both of you use the same key...

  • over 2 years ago

    Nothing has changed.  A few times a year, someone loses they developer key, and to recover, the old app needs to be removed, a new key created, a new manifest ID is needed (the store doesn't allow duplicate Manifest IDs) and the new app gets uploaded.  All previous stats are lost.  You want to protect your key.

  • over 2 years ago in reply to flocsy🤠

    I dunno about that. I'm not sure why they want us to have a developer key at all. What is the benefit of having one? What purpose does it serve?

  • over 2 years ago in reply to waterkip

    It's for security.  So that someone can't hijack an app.  I recall when keys were first added.  I think it was back in the early days of the CIQ 2.x SDKs