Is the xcode project name totally invisible to apple / consumers?

[scotopia]

Hey all,

Just had a quick question on something I've been unclear about for a long time. Often during development it might so happen that the name of our app might change from what it was in the beginning. Do I have to create a new project and copy/paste all my resources over to it; or is it fine if the project name stays the same and I just change the product name, identifiers and such. As an extreme example, say my project name was fcukapple: I obviously would want noone to know that was the xcode project name; therefore is this completely invisible to everyone once the build is made, even to apple reviewers etc?

If I knew it didn't matter it would save me a lot of copy/paste time; and that's a good thing. Thanks!

[RickMaddy]

I've renamed all my apps, sometimes more than once. As long as you change the "Product Name" build setting and ensure none of your resources reference the old name, there is no way to know what the project name is from the built product.

Just be diligent about finding all references. I just discovered yesterday one place I missed in a new app I submitted a few days ago. It's not enough for me to reject and resubmit but it annoys me to know it's there.

And always do a Clean All before you do a distribution build - just in case. Of course this is true regardless of a name change.

[scotopia]

Thanks for the quick reply as usual Rick. I'm glad it doesn't matter as long as you really catch everything. Does stuff like your App Delegate name and such matter or is that invisible in the build? Can we make like a check list right here so that we can have it for reference when renaming our apps. As you stated the obvious one that jumped out at me was the product name; what else do we need to change? I'm just talking about xcode stuff here; not like making sure you use the right words in your app. Thanks a lot.

[RickMaddy]

The most important items are the Product Name build setting and any value in your Info.plist file. Product Name is used for many things including the name of the binary file and several entries in Info.plist.

Of course the name of any file that ends up in the build may be important. It wouldn't be wise to have resource files with derogatory or inflammatory names. Remember, Apple or any customer has access to your app file (the ipa file). So anyone can extract the files and look at their names and contents.

Using the Unix command 'strings' make it easy to list all text found in any binary file. So it's possible to see class and method names under the right conditions. It's fine if names don't match the final product. The concern here would be "bad" names or "secret" things you don't want people to see.

As a tangent, be careful what you include in a build. I accidentally put out an update to one of my apps a while back that included some text files I used for TODO lists and other things. Nothing critical but not ideal if a competitor found it.

[scotopia]

Thanks Rick; I think these are useful things to know.