error from Transporter, "failed to get the app's bundle id"

Question

I'm preparing an app for the Mac OS app store. The app is a package that consists of a precompiled binary and a bunch of configuration parameters embedded in it's info.plist. The app isn't under development - it's been in use for several years, but I'm planning to smooth the distribution by getting it into the app store.

I created a .pkg for the app using "productbuild", and the package installs fine.

My problem is that feeding the .pkg to the transporter app always fails with "failed to create the .itmsp for .pkg Failed to get the apps bundle id"

the info.plist looks fine to me.

Q: what's wrong, what can I do about it, or is there an alternative path into the app store.

Answer 1

This error seems to occur for many different reasons. In my case, my Info.plist had an empty value for the NSHumanReadableCopyright key and it was missing the LSMinimumSystemVersion key entirely. After adding both of those, and resubmitting, the error no longer occurs.

So my best advice for combatting this error message is to compare your Info.plist to a known good one and see if you are missing any keys or if any of the key values are empty or possibly invalid. Unfortunate that this error message is a red herring.

Answer 2

If you use xcrun altool --validate-app to attempt to upload your app rather than Transport, it will give you the reason why it is failing to upload. In my case, Transporter gave me the same vague error message you were getting. At first, I tried adding LSMinimumSystemVersion, but still failed with same vague error. Then I tried xcrun altool --validate-app, I get:

2021-03-29 00:35:11.876 altool[1291:17262] *** Error: Unable to validate archive 'myApp.pkg'.
2021-03-29 00:35:11.876 altool[1291:17262] *** Error: code -27002 (Unable to validate your application. The Info.plist in the package must contain the CFBundleShortVersionString key.)

After I then added CFBundleShortVersionString, I was moving on.