The online home of John Pollard

App Store Issues with Watch Update

I’ve been making some minor updates to Count The Days Left

  • Added an optional badge icon so you can see how many days are left without even opening the app
  • Made the app universal so it works better on the iPad, improved the layout so it works in both in portrait and landscape modes, and can be used in Split View

Neither of these improvements are particularly interesting, but what I thought I’d write about was a very irritating bug in either the App Store or Xcode 7.2 (or some combination of the two).

As you can imagine none of the changes are particularly massive, but uploading an archive to iTunes Connect gave some strange errors:

  1. WatchKit 1.0 - Your previous version used an extension for Apple Watch but your current version doesn’t. Users who haven’t updated their Apple Watch to watchOS 2 or later may lose access to their Apple Watch extension.
  2. Invalid Icon Name - The watch application ‘daysleft.app/Watch/daysleft WatchKit App.app’ contains an invalid icon file name ‘daysleft.app/Watch/daysleft WatchKit App.app/WatchAppIcon44x44@2x.png’. Make sure that icon file names follow the pattern “*@x.png" and they match the required dimensions. Please visit developer.apple.com/watchkit for more information.

In particular the 2nd error is strange, as I’ve just used the standard Xcode Images.xcassets template to set the images. There is a 44x44@2x image required which I’ve definitely set to an 88 pixel square image, but it looks like there is a bug setting this in the archive generation.

Screenshot

I’m definitely not the only person seeing this issues, as there is at least one existing Radar bug been opened on the same topic. I also opened a Radar (23871724) - it seems opening duplicates is the best way of making sure Apple know it’s a common problem - which is now closed as a duplicate of yet another one (23859182) - so hopefully this is being addressed by Apple.

My guess is that this became a problem after I upgraded to Xcode 7.2, but I don’t have the energy to revert back to 7.1 to confirm.

I’m not sure if this will prevent the new version being released, so I’ve submitted it and all being well it’ll be available shortly.