You've tested your idea in a Playground, built a UI in Interface Builder, written and debugged your Swift code, and finally tested your app in the simulator. Now that the bulk of the work has been completed, this chapter is going to be about the final steps you'd take to get your app into the App Store.
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
- iOS simulators
- Sideloading
- Optimizing your app for the store
- Submitting your app to the App Store
Every example project that you've written in this book has been run on an iOS simulator. An iOS simulator is exactly that—a simulation of an iOS device. Other platforms will offer an emulator to test your code. Emulators recreate a hardware platform in software and then run your code on it. While an emulator would be a much more accurate way of testing your code, you need an extremely fast computer to emulate even the most basic of hardware, and an iPhone is anything but simple.
Because iOS is a pared-down version of Apple's desktop operating system OS X, running your code on a simulator is a completely legitimate way of testing your code. The hardware requirements are modest, and your code will run quickly and efficiently in this simulated environment.