At what point are app thumbnails attached?

[dolldivine]

Okay, I'm working between two computers, both with thumbnails in two different folders each and I'm SO confused right now.

I've gotten to one of the final stages.. I'm trying to upload my IPA to the App Store.  But it keeps complaining that there's missing thumbnails.  But I have a tonne of thumbnails.. I'm just not sure at which stage they are actually, like, attaching to the .ipa or being pulled into it etc, so I don't even know where to start troubleshooting.  Which of these points actually attach the thumbnails:

- I used a generic online thumbnail generator.  It created a folder which contains an assets.car file but also all the thumbnail images.  Are the images already in the asserts.car file there, and are they redundant?  Or do ALL the files have to be moved to the root, meaning, both assets.car and all the pngs?  I initially had everything in the root just in case.  I think I still do.  But I'm still curious if this is necessary because it really clutters my dev folder.

..but this said there were missing files, and I had no idea how to check inside of assets.car that I had the proper versions uploaded (because I didn't want all the images made from the 1024, I had hand-made custom ones for each side and preferred to use those), plus my husband was back home so I could finally download Xcode so...

- On the Mac, using Xcode, I also used the new project type instructions.  Opened the contents of my project, copy/pasted my assets.car from there to the root.  But in the folder (or whatever it is.. wherever Xcode was showing my assets.car file.. I don't really understand how Macs work), there were also two loose png thumbnails.  Was I supposed to copy/paste those into my root folder too?  The instructional tutorial I was following only said to copy/paste the assets.car file so that's all I did...

- Since no matter what I did, I still got errors, I noticed the step in the tutorial for adding some thumbnails in an xml.  I don't know how to attach an xml to an Animate file, so I tried also using the thumbnail upload thing inside Publish Settings and uploaded all the thumbnails I could there.  But when I compiled the IPA and emailed it to myself and transferred it back to a Mac (I've only been able to get the IPA to compile on the PC, not on the Mac), and tried to upload it, it's complaining about thumbnails more than ever.  So did it not pull in the extra thumbnails at time of compiling the IPA?  At what point are these frickin thumbnail PNGs actually pulled into another file???

[dolldivine]

Okay so...

Let's say I use Xcode to make assets.car.  Forget the generic online generator.

How long do my thumbnails have to stay in the root (or specified relative location?)?
During the creation of assets.car?during the import of assets.car when publishing the ipa?  (or is the assets.car not even pulled into the .ipa and should also still hang out in the root with the ipa?)

And when I transfer the IPA back to the Mac for upload to the App Store/or TestFlight, do the locations of assets.car and the pngs matter then too, or are they incorporated into he files then?  Am I making sense lol?  I feel like I've gone completely insane..

[Colin Holgate]

DO use the generic online generator. I spent ages trying to fix the one made by Xcode, the online one worked right away.

You add the Assets.car file into your package, it doesn't depend on any of the original icons. But, also include all of the icon files, and their entries in the app descriptor XML, because they're needed for older versions of iOS.

The splash screens are a separate thing, Assets.car is jus the app icons. You still need to have added the 28 different types of splash screens.

[dolldivine]

Ayyy, really?  But an icon that's 20x20 requires a different composition than one that's 1024x1024.. First the launch images, now this.. I hate cutting corners.  BUT.. I believe you, so, okay, I'll re-try running with the generator.

Okay, so once an assets.car is made, the icons are inside of it and their position in their folder is irrelevant, is what you're saying?  Thank you, that's helpful.  And once I "publish" the IPA, is assets.car inside of that?  Or does that still have to sit in the root folder?

What *is* an XML file?  Just a code file?  Does Animate create it or do I have to make it, and if so, do I add that to the assets?  And if I'm also adding thumbnails with the xml file, at what point do those png's get added?  When the IPA is compiled?

Thanks Colin!!!

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

You're right that ideally you would create a different icon for the 20x20 use case, but try to live with not being perfect, and have a 1024x1024 icon that will still be ok at the smaller sizes. Don't forget to have it be a full square, the rounded corners are done by the system.

The Assets.car file ends up inside the IPA. An IPA file is just a zip file, if you rename it to .zip and expand it, then on a Mac right-click on the .app file to look at its contents, you'll see all of the splash screens, icons, and the Assets.car file, are inside the .app. They also will all have the correct file names.

The XML file is just a text file, and ADT uses it to know how to compile the IPA. If you're not using Adobe Animate, which has a section for adding the icons, you would use a text editor to edit the XML to add the icons. The file names of the icons doesn't matter, just that they are inside the right tags in XML. I'll put a screenshot of that section of the XML from one of my apps, you'll see that I just name the file after the icon size.

[dolldivine]

Wow, thanks for that very thorough and helpful answer, Colin!

Now I definitely have a better feel for how things come together.  Have you thought about making tutorials haha?

I *am* using Adobe Animate.  So the step with editing an XML manually is redundant with using Animate's icon upload under "AIR for iOS Settings"?  And do you know by chance, when I specify icon pngs in the icon uploader, are they uploaded into the IPA at the time that the IPA is published?

[Colin Holgate]

The icons you add in the publish settings are added to the IPA when it gets created, when you publish.

There are going to be other reasons that you might be editing the XML, to do some things that you can't do inside the publish settings. Mostly those would be to do with setting the minimum iOS version you want to use, or to add strings in connection with permissions to use different iOS features. Here's an article talking about adding support for geolocation, as an example:

Adobe AIR * Setting mobile application properties

[dolldivine]

Thanks.  And thanks for the tip about unzipping the IPA.. that really helped me visualize what's in it at which point.

So, I took your advice and went back to the auto generated thumbnail set.  I re-did all the steps.  The amount of errors went back down again, which is good.  So yeah, obviously Xcode was introducing some of its own, argh.

So this is all thats left now for errors:

ERROR ITMS-90032: "Invalid Image Path - No image found at the path referenced under key 'CFBundleIcons': 'Icon@2x.png'"

ERROR ITMS-90032: "Invalid Image Path - No image found at the path referenced under key 'CFBundleIcons': 'Icon.png'"

ERROR ITMS-90032: "Invalid Image Path - No image found at the path referenced under key 'CFBundleIcons': 'Icon-Small.png'"

Googling this yields a multitude of results, all of which require some minute glitches and tinkering and it's all completely beyond me.  There doesn't seem to be a way to look inside of assets.car itself, but the image names it's complaining about were definitely inside of the auto generated folder.  They're all basic, older formats so it's not like a new requirement popped up.  I have no idea where to go from here..

[dolldivine]

OMIGOSH I GOT IT TO WORK

I went back and made sure that all the thumbnails uploaded via Adobe's AIR for iOS settings were from the auto generated icon set, and not the ones I made myself.  And.. that fixed it!

So you were right Colin.. it's better to use the auto generated set, both for making assets.car AND for the old version pics.  I guess again, like with the launch images, either me or my computer is doing something strange to the formatting that the system doesn't like.  It's so frustrating not to know what still.. Cant make my own custom launch images.  Cant make custom thumbnails.. On the bright side, next time I won't try and I'll save lots of time

[dolldivine]

...aaaand, already rejected.  Now.. what in the world is an "asset catalogue".. Will the hell never end?

[dolldivine]

So the asset catalogue is assets.car?  So does this mean that now, even though it was the only thing working, apple is NOT accepting the generically generated online assets.car file?

So now I'm back to square one where I was three days ago.. I'm trying again in Xcode to make this goddamn file..  But Im using the icons generated by the online generator, to eliminate any issues from formatting from my computer.  Now I'm getting an error that I need to assign a team.  Omigod.  But it doesn't tell me where to go to assign the team.  Now I'm looking through every single option in Xcode.. I just. want. this. to. end.

[dolldivine]

Recreated everything, this time in Xcode.  Auto-rejected again, same reason.  I don't know what to do.  I have to pick the kids up from school.  I guess I'll start a new thread when I get back *sigh*.

[Colin Holgate]

Don't use the Xcode one, and make sure you added the automatic created one in the publishing settings Genera tab. You have to add the Assets.car file there.

The online tool gives you all of the other size icons you'll need, which you discovered you need to add in the Icons tab of the settings, to keep older iOS happy.

Make sure you're using a recent version of AIR. Might as well be using AIR 31.

[dolldivine]

I did.. I did all that.  But the app store accepted the IPA, then automatically rejected it for missing an "asset catalogue".  It's like it didn't recognize the generated and included assets.car..  Or does it want more than assets.car?

[dolldivine]

Since this question *is* technically answered, I'm gonna start a new thread for my new woes ~

[dolldivine]

Nevermind.  I got it to work.  So Ill just explain here in case anyone ends up here with the same problem...

What I did wrong this time is when I created the new set of autogenerated assets.car thumbnails, I appended into Adobe Animate the assets.car file still in the subfolder (the file #s are getting out of control so I was trying to be organized).  Adobe didn't throw an error at it being in a subfolder, but Apple apparently didn't like it.  So anyway, the moral is:

Put your assets.car into the root folder when appending it in Animate.