Creating your branded app

Dedicated mobile app

Your mobile app carries your name, your icon and your colors, and is published under your own publisher name on the App Store and Google Play. We build it, sign it and submit it for you.

This document sets out what we need from you, in the order you should tackle it.

How it works

The app is published on your own accounts, under your publisher name. You remain its owner: the listing, the analytics and the relationship with the stores are yours. We act as a technical provider, with access you can revoke at any time.

You take care of	We take care of
Your developer accounts and their upkeep	Building and signing the app
Creating the identifier and keys with Apple	Producing the icons and screenshots
Providing your brand identity	Submitting the app and its updates
Writing and publishing the store listings	Ongoing technical maintenance

Prerequisites

An active Apple Developer Program account and an active Google Play Console account, both in your company's name.

On the Google side

Make sure it is an Organization account: personal accounts are subject to a mandatory testing period that delays any first release by several weeks.

1. On the Apple side

To create in your account

• The app identifier matching the agreed technical identifier — for example com.mycompany.check — with the Push Notifications capability enabled.
• A distribution certificate, exported as a .p12 file from Keychain Access on a Mac, with a password of your choosing.
• A provisioning profile of type App Store for that identifier.
• An App Store Connect API key, created under Users and Access → Integrations. Choose a Team Key — not an individual key, which lacks the necessary rights — with the App Manager role.

What this key cannot do

The App Manager role allows uploading builds and managing TestFlight, nothing more. It gives no access to your certificates and identifiers, nor to your team's user management. This is deliberate: we should not hold those powers over your account.

To send us, over a secure channel

Item	Details
Distribution certificate	The .p12 file and the password chosen at export
Provisioning profile	The .mobileprovision file, App Store type
App Store Connect API key	The downloaded .p8 file, its Key ID, and the Issuer ID shown at the top of the page
Team ID	Under Membership, a ten-character code

Two things to watch

The .p8 file can be downloaded only once: Apple offers it when the key is created and never again, so keep a copy.

Both the certificate and the profile expire after one year: they will need to be recreated and sent to us again, otherwise updates stop going out.

2. On the Google side

Nothing to create. In Play Console → Users and permissions, invite the service account address we will give you, limiting access to your app alone, with two permissions:

• View app information — read only;
• Release to testing tracks, and release to production once you want updates to go out automatically.

You send us no files on the Google side. The key is ours, you only grant access — and you can revoke it at any time from that same page.

We also produce the app's upload key, and we enable Play App Signing: Google keeps the final signing key, which protects you against losing it and guarantees you can take over later.

3. Your app's identity

Item	What we need
App name	The name shown under the icon on the home screen, and reused on the store listings. Thirty characters at most, but aim for about a dozen: beyond that, phones truncate it under the icon. Example: My Company Check
Technical identifier (package name)	A unique identifier, shared by iOS and Android, of the form com.mycompany.check. It follows strict rules: lowercase letters, digits and underscores only, at least two segments separated by dots, each segment starting with a letter. No hyphens, accents, spaces or capitals. It is permanent: no store allows it to be changed after the first release.
Link keyword	A unique word that lets your links open the app directly, from an email for instance. Lowercase, no spaces or accents, and specific to your app: two apps sharing the same word compete to open links. Example: mycompanycheck
Icon	Square PNG, 1024 × 1024, with no transparency and no rounded corners — those are applied by the operating systems. We derive every size we need from it.
Logo	PNG with a transparent background, landscape format. Displayed inside the app: sign-in screen and headers.
Colors	A primary and a secondary color, in hexadecimal, and for each the color of the text shown on top — white or black. If your CaRool web interface is already set to your colors, we reuse that palette and you have nothing to send. Example: primary #f6be00 with black text

4. The store listings

The App Store and Google Play listings are yours to handle: descriptions, category, privacy policy, support addresses, content rating and data collection declarations. You write and publish them from your own consoles.

On our side, we provide the screenshots of the app, in the formats both stores expect.

Do not forget the test account

In the Apple listing, enter the credentials and phone number of a working account. This is the leading cause of rejection: Apple turns down any app whose behavior its reviewers cannot verify.

What we need in return

As soon as both listings exist, send us their addresses. The app uses them to offer updates to your users.

The timeline

Step	Who	Indicative time
Opening the developer accounts	You	2 to 6 weeks
Sending the access details and the assets	You	1 day
App creation and first test build	Us	2 to 3 days
Testing on TestFlight and on Google Play internal track	You	at your own pace
Submission and review by Apple and Google	The stores	1 to 7 days

A word from experience

The first Apple review is the least predictable: that is where last-minute requirements surface. Allow some slack, and avoid announcing a firm launch date to your teams before the first approval.

What remains your responsibility over time

• Keeping the developer accounts alive: annual renewal with Apple, accepting new agreements.
• The annual renewal of the certificate and the provisioning profile, and sending them to us.
• The accuracy of your privacy policy and your data collection declarations.
• Maintaining your App Store and Google Play listings.

Checklist

What we need from you, in one list.

• App identifier created with Apple, Push capability enabled
• Distribution certificate: .p12 file and its password
• App Store provisioning profile
• App Store Connect API key with the App Manager role: .p8, Key ID, Issuer ID
• Your Apple Team ID
• An invitation for our service account in your Play Console
• App name
• Technical identifier, shared by iOS and Android
• Link keyword
• Icon 1024 × 1024 with no transparency, and a transparent landscape logo
• Primary and secondary colors, and the matching text colors
• Your App Store and Google Play listings, written and published
• The addresses of both listings, once created

A question about any of these? Write to us — we would rather answer before you start.