Case Study · 16

Graduating from "Works on My Mac" — Automating iOS Builds and Releases

I took iOS builds that kept failing around the move to RN 0.77's New Architecture and tied them together with 4 shell scripts and an npm chain, getting to a state where a release is a one-line `build:ios:testflight` command.

Product
MeetMate (Mobile)
Role
Frontend Engineer
Period
2025.12
Stack
React Native 0.77 Xcode CocoaPods RN Codegen
Implementation AI-paired (Claude agent)
  • Pinned the 4 manual click-through procedures for fixing build failures into 4 shell scripts: Codegen, DerivedData, icon compositing, icon generation.
  • App Store upload rejected because of the AppIcon alpha channel → passes. White background composited with `sips --composite`.
  • TestFlight upload reduced to one line: `npm run build:ios:testflight`. archive → IPA → altool chain.
  • Android crashes and app freezes from the same period cleaned up in the same batch. Both platforms back to buildable on the same day.

Background

Moving up to RN 0.77 set off a whole set of iOS build traps at once. Codegen output collided with the cache so builds failed repeatedly, DerivedData had to be cleared by hand every time, and the AppIcon was getting App Store uploads rejected because of its alpha channel.

There were 4 manual click-through procedures, one for each symptom, but who had to click what, in what order lived only in someone’s head. A “works on my Mac” build was really a build that worked only inside one person’s head.

Approach

I pinned each of the 4 build traps into its own shell file. fix_codegen.sh selectively deletes only ios/build/generated and runs pod install automatically (so no time is wasted deleting all of build/). fix_xcode_build.sh clears DerivedData in one go.

The AppIcon alpha-channel issue was resolved in fix_icon_transparency.sh by compositing a white background with sips --composite, and icon generation was set up in generate_ios_icons.sh to take a 1024pt original and automatically generate 10 sizes down to 20pt.

A build should be “a sequence pinned down in scripts,” not “a procedure people remember” — from the moment I accepted that, debugging time dropped even more than build time.

Finally, I created a build:ios:archive → export → upload → testflight chain in package.json. Everything up to the App Store Connect upload via xcrun altool now fits in a single command, and I bundled in the Android crash and app-freeze issues that came up at the same time, stabilizing both platforms together.

Results

  • 4 manual click-through procedures for build failures → pinned into one-command shell scripts (fix_codegen.sh / fix_xcode_build.sh / fix_icon_transparency.sh / generate_ios_icons.sh).
  • App Store upload rejected because of the AppIcon alpha channel → passes. 11 icon PNGs + Info.plist updated together.
  • TestFlight upload can be done with one line: npm run build:ios:testflight (archive → IPA → altool chain).
  • Handling Android/iOS stabilization from the same period as one batch reached a state where both platforms could build again on the same day.

What I Learned

Not confining frontend work to what’s on the screen turned out to be the fastest path. The moment you push iOS builds, codegen, icons, and TestFlight uploads outside your own scope, “I don’t know why it doesn’t work” becomes a weekly recurring task. Breaking that cycle with 4 shell scripts and 4 npm scripts gave back more time than any feature I added.