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You don't need to pay Apple $99. You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight
by mercutio2 2mo ago
You don't need to pay Apple $99.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
- hard_times 2mo ago> You can redeploy with minimal effort every week No thank you
- reolbox 2mo agoIndeed No thank you. Tried this with my personal habit tracker. Had to login again with my Apple ID so often and right when I needed my app it expired (good luck if you don’t have your laptop with you). Converted it into a PWA and be done with it. Weekly redeploys are a big PIA. A pity you cannot use an iPhone for personal projects.
- mft_ 2mo ago> You can redeploy with minimal effort. Can I ask what your workflow is for this "minimal effort"? Maybe I'm missing something, as I thought it would require manual faffing with laptop, Xcode, etc. every week? (PS I've tried the two prominent sideloading approaches, but couldn't get either of them to work on my iPhone.)
- forsalebypwner 2mo agoAltStore, Sideloadly, SideStore all have mechanisms for automating the weekly redeploys, to name a few.
- mft_ 2mo agoFWIW, I have tried 2/3 of those and failed to get them working satisfactorily.