How to publish your vbgnt game to the iOS App Store

This is the hardest of the four, and it is worth being blunt about why before you spend a weekend on it. Not the export, which is routine. The review. Apple's guidelines are explicitly hostile to small, simple, or template-shaped games, and a game generated in an afternoon can look like exactly that to a reviewer who has never met you.

It is doable, and people do it. But go in knowing that the technical work is the easy half.

What you need before you start

• A Mac. Not optional. iOS builds must be produced on macOS with Xcode installed, and there is no supported way around it.
• The Apple Developer Program, at $99 a year as of August 2026. Unlike Steam's fee this is a subscription, and your apps come off the store if you stop paying it.
• Xcode 26 or later. Since 28 April 2026, App Store Connect only accepts builds made with Xcode 26 and the iOS 26 SDK. Apple raises this floor roughly once a year, so check the requirement before you install a toolchain.
• Patience for signing. More on this below. It is where everyone loses their afternoon.

Step 1: the project, and what already works

Download the project zip from the studio's Files tab, open it in Godot 4, and confirm it runs. Then note what you do not have to build, because it is more than you would expect.

vbgnt games ship with multitouch on-screen controls as a hard requirement, sized for thumbs and shown only when a touchscreen is present. On every other engine-to-App-Store guide, that is the chapter about rebuilding your input layer for mobile. Here it is already done.

What still needs attention is the shape of a phone: safe areas around the notch and the home indicator, portrait versus landscape lock, and what happens when a call arrives and the app suspends mid-game.

Step 2: the export preset

Install the iOS export templates, then add an iOS preset. Two fields are mandatory and the export throws an error if either is blank:

• Bundle Identifier, in reverse-domain form, for example com.yourname.frostlinegp. It must match the App ID you create in the developer portal exactly.
• App Store Team ID, from your Apple developer account.

Exporting does not produce a finished app. It produces an Xcode project, which you then open, sign and build. That indirection catches people out: the Godot export succeeding does not mean you have anything submittable yet.

Step 3: signing, where the afternoon goes

The single most common failure is a mismatch between what the Godot export preset asks for and what your provisioning profile actually grants. Entitlements have to be enabled in three places that must agree: the App ID configuration in the Apple Developer portal, the provisioning profile, and the export preset.

When they disagree you get errors like "No provisioning profiles with a valid signing identity were found", which sounds like a certificate problem and usually is not. It is usually an entitlement you enabled in Godot and never enabled on the App ID.

The way to stay sane is to enable nothing you do not need. A single-player game with no accounts, no purchases and no notifications needs almost no entitlements, and every one you leave off is a mismatch that cannot happen.

Step 4: the App Store Connect paperwork

Create the app record, then work through a list that is longer than it looks:

• App icons at every required size, with no transparency and no rounded corners of your own.
• A launch screen.
• Screenshots for each required device class, currently the 6.9 inch iPhone and the 13 inch iPad.
• A privacy policy URL, which is required even for a game that collects nothing. It has to be a real reachable page.
• The App Privacy questionnaire. If your game collects nothing, say so, and say it accurately.
• An age rating questionnaire.
• An export compliance declaration about encryption. Most games answer no, but you must answer.

Push a build to TestFlight first and install it on a real device. The simulator will not catch performance problems, and a generated 3D game is exactly the kind of thing that runs at 60fps on a Mac and 22fps on a four-year-old phone.

Step 5: the review, and the guideline that matters

Two guidelines decide whether a small game gets through.

4.2, Minimum Functionality. Apple wants apps that go beyond a repackaged website or a thin wrapper. A game is inherently better placed here than a utility, but a very short one with a single screen is arguing against the grain.

4.3, Spam. This is the one to actually plan around. It targets apps that are duplicates or near-duplicates of things already on the store, and apps from the same developer that look like variations on one template. If you submit five generated games from one account in a month, you are describing the exact pattern this guideline exists to catch, and the rejections will arrive together.

So the strategy is the opposite of what a generative studio makes easy: submit one game, and make it the substantial one. Give it a settings screen, progression, multiple levels, a real icon, and enough content that a reviewer playing it for four minutes has not seen all of it. Then leave the other four on your arcade and on itch, where they belong.

How long it takes

Review is usually measured in days rather than weeks. But budget for at least one rejection, because a first submission from a new developer with a small game frequently gets one, and the resubmission cycle adds days each time. A month from starting to being live is a realistic plan.

The honest read

The App Store is the wrong first home for a game you made in an afternoon. The fee is recurring, the toolchain requires hardware you may not own, the review is genuinely adversarial toward small games, and the reward is a listing in the most crowded software market that has ever existed.

Where it does make sense is when one game has outgrown its arcade. If it has real players, if people are asking for it on their phone, and if it is big enough that nobody would call it a template, then the $99 and the weekend are buying something concrete.

Until then, your game already runs perfectly on an iPhone. It runs in Safari, from a link, with touch controls the studio built in, and with nothing to install. That is not a consolation prize. For most games that come out of a generative studio, it is the better product.