KAKhalid Alaoui Open to freelance & full-time Email me
  1. Khalid Alaoui, iOS developer
  2. Control room
Case study · internal tool

The control room

An internal console I built to run releases for 493 branded iOS apps from one screen: parallel builds, live progress, failures grouped by cause, and a wizard for new clients. Try a working replica below.

Apps managed
493
Written by me
5,893 lines
Built in
15 days
Tests
35

Run a rollout

This is a working replica on invented data. Every restaurant name here is made up; the real console shows clients' names, so I rebuilt it rather than screenshot it. Press Start build, or let the tour drive.

🛠 Branded Apps Console · manage00:00:00 · live
Target version3.3.00
Need a rebuild24
On target0
Live at target0
never pulled

No active run. Press Start build.

Failure clusters grouped by root cause

  • No active failures

Recently finished

  • Nothing yet
01

Hundreds of apps, and only a terminal

The release pipeline made shipping an app one command. At 493 apps, one command still isn’t enough: someone has to choose which apps, watch dozens of builds, work out why some failed, and keep track of what the App Store actually shows.

Before

  • Build scripts run from a terminal, logs read by hand
  • “Which apps are behind?” meant checking files
  • A repeat failure had to be worked out again
  • Adding a client meant editing several files and clicking through Apple’s portal

After

  • One screen with every app, its version and its status
  • Behind-target apps found and built automatically
  • Failures grouped by cause, with the known fix beside them
  • A three-step wizard that stops and resumes safely

The goal was written into the tool’s own guide: ship a whole fleet of apps from one screen, without touching a terminal or Xcode. I wrote it so someone who isn’t an iOS developer could run a release.

02

Six jobs, one place

Build

Build runs

Rebuild many apps at once to pick up a new template version, retry a failed upload or push a one-off fix. You choose how many run in parallel.

Watch

Live progress

Which app each lane is on, how long it has taken, what succeeded or failed and how much disk is left, refreshed every second.

Fix

Grouped failures

Failures are grouped by their cause, with the bundle id stripped out so the same problem across ten apps becomes one line, matched to the fix that worked before.

Track

Rollout & store status

Every app’s version against the target, and what the App Store shows customers right now, including anything removed from sale.

Edit

Per-app settings

Change a name, brand colour or feature switch, or swap the icon and images, written straight into the files the next build reads.

Add

New client wizard

A guided flow that stands up a brand-new app: local files, then its App Store record, then its signing. Resumable if you stop halfway.

What a failure cluster looks like

4× Apple Pay Merchant ID mismatch in the entitlements
four apps, one line
💡 Known pattern. Remove the in-app-payments key from the merchant’s entitlements file entirely, not just empty it.

Four patterns are recorded so far. The list is built to grow: whenever I root-cause a new failure, I add it, and the next run shows the fix beside the failure.

03

A new client in three steps

Provisioning a restaurant used to mean editing configuration by hand and clicking through Apple’s portal. Now it is a form with a live preview. Type a name and pick a colour.

  1. 1Identitylocal only
  2. 2App Storea real Apple change
  3. 3Signingmatch & profiles

Step 1 only creates files in the repo and is reversible. Step 2 is a real Apple change, so it only runs for apps you’ll ship. You can close the page and resume later.

H
Harbor Grillcom.zaytech.harborgrill
04

A thin layer over tools that already worked

The console doesn’t replace the build pipeline, it drives it. The scripts stay in charge of building; the server starts them, reads their logs and checks the results against Apple.

No polling

The page loads once, then opens one Server-Sent Events connection. The server pushes a fresh snapshot every second down that open line, and the page just applies it.

One source of markup

Each message carries finished HTML fragments, not raw data, so there is no second rendering path in JavaScript to drift out of sync with the Python.

Parallel and isolated

Each build slot is its own git worktree with its own process group, so a stop button can kill exactly one lane’s whole process tree.

# the whole install: one Python file, then one click
$ python3 scripts/dashboard.py
# or the Mac app I wrapped around it, from the Desktop
$ open "Branded Apps Dashboard.app"
05

Every build is a real App Store upload

A button here can upload to Apple, delete files or commit to git, so the tool is built on the assumption that something will go wrong.

  • Local only. It binds to loopback, and every request’s Host header is checked, so a web page that points its own hostname at 127.0.0.1 (DNS rebinding) is rejected.
  • No stray tabs. Anything that changes state must carry a custom header only the console’s own page sends, which blocks cross-site requests.
  • Asks first. Every action that changes something confirms, and deleting an app touches local files only, never anything live on Apple’s side.
  • Resumable. The new-client wizard records how far it got, and a version bump is committed locally; pushing is a separate, deliberate step.
  • Tested. 35 unit tests cover the version arithmetic, failure grouping, log parsing, store reconciliation and the request guards.

What isn’t built yet: multi-user sign-in, and a split between the build monitor and the app list. Both are on the roadmap. It is built for one operator, hardened to grow.

06

In numbers

5,893lines in one file, every one mine by git blame
32commits, 11 to 25 August 2026
35unit tests on the logic that matters
493apps it can build, track and edit
1 sbetween live updates, over a single connection
3build modes: update, rebuild, new patch

Built with Python’s standard library (http.server, threads, Server-Sent Events), Pillow for icons and PyJWT for the App Store Connect API. No framework, so there is nothing to install on the build Mac.

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