In my experience working on UE 4.23.3 I was having difficulty to find all the info at one place related to getting started for iOS . After lot of struggle I manged to do it. So I decided to document steps I followed. I hope this would be helpful for devs who wants to get started working on iOS.
MAC Book Setup
- Make sure you have the latest iOS.
- Install Visual Studio for mac
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac - IDE for macOS - Install Xcode from the apple store.
- Install Unreal Engine Launcher for Unreal Engine website.
- Install the Unreal Engine from Launcher.
Apple Developer Account
Related Link
- Purchase the Apple dev account. It will take approx. one day to get activated.
- Go to Sign In - Apple
- Select “Certificates,Identifiers & Profiles” form account page.
- In Certificates, click Plus (+) icon to create new certificate.
- Select “iOS App Development”. Then Continue.
- Now You need to generate a CSR file from your Mac.( Click on “Learn More” for steps to generate it.). Make sure you save on you disk.
- Upload the saved CSR file by using “Choose File” option and the “Continue”.
- Download the file. I recommend you create a separate folder at a specific location since you will be downloading few more files.
- Now from Sign In - Apple select “Identifiers” and select Plus (+) icon to Register new app.
- Select App IDs and Continue.
- Select the Platform. And add Description or you can type actual app name.
- Bundle ID is very important. Make sure you remember this. You need to enter this in Unreal Engine project settings later on so I recommend you copy your created Bundle ID in notes or somewhere else.
- Continue and Register.
- Now from Sign In - Apple select “Profiles” and select Plus (+) icon to Register a New Provisioning Profile
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Select iOS App Development.
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On Next Page select the app Id you created earlier.
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On Next Page select Certificate you created earlier.
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On Next Page Select all the devices you want to deploy on.
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On Next Page Name your Provision Profile and go on next to Generate it and then download to your same specific location.
Unreal Project Setup
Project Settings – Platforms – iOS
Import Certificate and then Import Provision. (Note they are Valid)
Bellow in Bundle Information-
- Add Bundle Display Name – This will be app display name.
- Add Bundle Name
- Add Bundle Identifier – This should be same ad Bundle ID given in step 5 of Apple Developer Account section.
Few Key Notes:
(I used UE 4.24.3) There is known bug of Code Signing in Unreal Engine. I haven’t encountered the solution of it. You will face this issue while packaging for iOS Distribution and using iOS Provision Profile for Distribution. One More issue I faces was adding app icon of the app, the applied app icon won’t reflect in app so to solve that add a blank C++ file to your project if your project doesn’t have one.
iOS Packaging From Windows
To do this you need to have only Blueprint Only Project and follow the steps from the following video.
Few Key Notes:
There is no way you can solve the app Icon issue on Windows since you can’t have C++ file and I you do the you need to setup the Remote Build. App size on Windows was almost double the size of ipa packaged from Mac.
Some Other Helpful Links
http://www.moreporkgames.com/devblog/2017/2/10/reducing-the-size-of-your-ios-or-android-app-unreal-engine-4
Please feel free add correction 