A friend got a 4th gen AppleTV in late 2015 – a friend that enjoys retro video games, but that doesn’t own any consoles. I tried Provenance on my iPad and was pretty satisfied, and figured it would be pretty nifty on the AppleTV. This friend is not a developer, and at the time didn’t own a computer new enough to interface with a modern iOS device. Even if she did, she objected to paying $100 / year for the permission to run a self-built app (an objection I share), so I figured I would handle the building and installing part during one of my occasional visits to her town (~6 hours away by car).
You’re probably already thinking about how this is likely to blow up, and you’re right: roughly 1 year after I deployed the app to the AppleTV, the provisioning profile expired, and then nobody could play pokemon anymore. I felt truly terrible about this. DRM sucks.
Then just a few days ago, the black macbook was replaced with one of the fancy new ones – new enough to speak directly to an AppleTV, new enough to run the current version of Xcode. With the help of a reverse SSH tunnel, I screen shared to her machine to build and install the current version of Provenance, only to find out that the current version uses a different bundle ID. I had no luck convincing Xcode to replace the old Provenance app bundle with the newly built one, using the existing data container.
To my pleasant surprise, Xcode’s Download / Replace Container feature actually saved the day, and I was able to export the ~2 GB container from the old broken-for-years Provenance version, and hand that container to the new Provenance version. This is sort of a bare minimum level of data portability, but it’s more than I expected, so “props”. My friend is pretty excited about picking up where she left off with the pokemans!
