Shipping to TestFlight Without Fastlane: Raw xcodebuild, Auto-Incrementing Builds, and One Neat Provisioning Trick

Most iOS CI tutorials reach for Fastlane. It's the default assumption. And Fastlane is fine — but it's also another Ruby toolchain to maintain, another layer of abstraction between you and xcodebuild errors, and another thing that breaks when Xcode updates. For a small side project, I wanted zero overhead. So I wrote a release script using plain xcodebuild and xcrun altool, and wired it into GitHub Actions. Here's what I learned. The Setup The app is a no-dependency iOS project (Swi...