Updating out dated apps. Please help!

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Created Oct ’20

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Hello everyone, I was an avid developer from 2009 to 2012. However I let my membership expire in 2012 leading leading to about 10 apps of mine to be taken off the App Store. Recently I have renewed my membership and all of my apps are now “ready for sale”. However, they can’t be released into to the store without an update from this years Xcode. The last time these apps ran on an iPhone was with the iPhone 4.

My question is this, I have a brand new laptop and the newest version of Xcode along with the preferred device. I have all of the data and source code of the apps on my old laptop from 2012. What would be the best way if possible to transfer the data to the new laptop so I can successfully run them and distribute them to the App Store? Thank you for any help!

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Answer 1

Etresoft OP

Oct ’20

Github?

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Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Oct ’20

There are multiple factors in play here:

Transferring data from your old laptop.
Credentials
Updating your projects
Updating your code

I’ll tackle each in turn.

If your old laptop is functional then transferring files from it is not hard. You can go via the network, use a USB stick, use Migration Assistant, and so on.

As far as credentials are concerned, the only thing you need to be worried about is Developer ID signing identities. Developer ID signing identities are precious so, if you created any of those back in the day, you should rescue them from your old laptop.

IMPORTANT Developer ID is a Mac thing, and I suspect you’re only targeting iOS. If that’s the case then you don’t have to worry about this at all. All the credentials you need to deploy to iOS can be regenerated using the developer web site.

I’m not sure whether a modern Xcode will open your old projects. I suspect it will but, if not, you have two options:

Do a stepwise upgrade, by installing an intermediate version of Xcode and upgrading the project with that. In some cases old versions of Xcode won’t run on the latest OS release, in which case you can run them on the old OS in a VM.
Re-create your project from scratch.

Updating your code is the tricky part. There have been a lot of changes to our systems in the last 10 years. Unfortunately it’s hard to advise you here because it very much depends on what your code does. However, I have two general suggestions:

You could throw away your UI code and switch to something more modern. For example, if your UI needs are relatively straightforward it may be easier to just rewrite that in SwiftUI.
You could just update the code. If you hit a problem, feel free to create a new thread with the details of that specific problem. Make sure to apply the appropriate tags, for example, if you’re having problems with a UITableView, use the UIKit tag.

Best of luck!

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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