Before the Shadow Play

Category: iOS

  • Life in the fast lane / Surely makes you lose your mind

    I came back to the Radiospiral iOS app after some time away (we’re trying to dope out what’s going on with metadata from various broadcast setups appearing in the wrong positions on the “now playing” screen, and we need a new beta with the test streams enabled to try things), only to discover that Fastlane had gotten broken in a very unintuituve manner. Whenever I tried to use it, it took a crack at building things, then told me I needed to update the snapshotting Swift file.

    Okay, so I do that, and the error persists. Tried a half-dozen suggestions from Stack Overflow. Error persists. I realized I was going to need to do some major surgery and eliminate all the variables if I was going to be able to make this work.

    What finally fixed it was cleaning up multiple Ruby installs and getting down to just one known location, and then using Bundler to manage the Fastlane dependencies. The actual steps were:

    1. removing rvm
    2. removing rbenv
    3. brew install ruby to get one known Ruby install
    4. making the Homebrew Ruby my default ( export PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.7.0/bin:$PATH)
    5. rm -rf fastlane to clear out any assumptions
    6. rm Gemfile* to clean up any assumptions by the current, broken Fastlane
    7. bundle install fastlane (not gem install!) to get a clean one and limit the install to just my project
    8. bundle exec fastlane init to get things set up again

    After all that, fastlane was back to working, albeit only via bundle exec, which in hindsight is actually smarter.

    The actual amount of time spent trying to fix it before giving up and removing every Ruby in existence was ~2 hours, so take my advice and make sure you are absolutely sure which Ruby you are running, and don’t install fastlane into your Ruby install; use bundler. Trying to fix it with things going who knows where…well, there’s always an applicable xkcd.

    You are in a maze of Python installations, all different

  • App Store Connect usability issues

    Allow me to be the Nth person to complain about App Store Connect’s lack of transparency, I’m currently working on an app for radiospiral.net’s net radio station, and I’m doing my proper dilligence by getting it beta tested by internal testers before pushing it to the App Store. I’m using TestFlight to keep it as simple as possible (and because fastlane seems to work well with that setup).

    I managed to get two testers in play, but I was trying to add a third today and I could not get the third person to show up as an internal tester because I kept missing a step. Here’s how it went, with my mental model in brackets:

    • Go to the users and groups page and add the new user. [okay, the new user’s available now].
    • Add them to the same groups as the other tester who I got working. [right, all set up the same…]
    • Added the app explicitly to the tester. […and they’ve got the app]
    • Mail went out to the new tester. [cool, the site thinks they should be a tester] [WRONG]
    • Tester installs Testflight and taps the link on their device. Nothing appreciable happens. [Did I set them up wrong?]
    • Delete the user, add them again. [I’ll set them up again and double-check…yes, they match]
    • They tap again. Still nothing. [what? but…]
    • Go over to the Testflight tab and look at the list of testers. Still not there. [I added them. why are they not there?] [also wrong]

    Much Googling and poking about got me nothing at all. Why is the user I added as an internal tester not there? They should be in the list.

    I went back to the page and this time I saw the little blue plus in a circle. I have to add them here too! Clicked the +, and the new user was there, waiting to be added to the internal testers.

    Sigh.

    So now I have blogged this so I can remember the process, and hopefully someone else who’s flailing around trying to figure out why internal testers aren’t showing up on the testers list will find this.