Automate your app's build & version numbers for consistency

Version and the build numbers work together to uniquely identify a particular App Store submission for an app:

• Version number (CFBundleShortVersionString) - shown as Version in Xcode, also called the marketing version: The version that’s visible to the end-user, it has to be incremented on each public App Store release
• Build number (CFBundleVersion) - shown as Build in Xcode: an incrementing number

In today’s iOS development processes there is no reason you should manually change those numbers. Instead, you want a reliable and automated system taking care of keeping the versions up to date.

There is no need to use third-party tools, Xcode has a tool called agvtool built-in. (more details)

After initially enabling the Versioning System for your Xcode project, you can use the following commands:

# Update the version number (CFBundleShortVersionString)
agvtool new-marketing-version 2.0

# Update the build number (CFBundleVersion) to the next one
agvtool next-version -all

If you use the deployment tool fastlane you can use increment_version_number and increment_build_number to automate the version bump as part of your deployment step

Example Fastfile:

lane :beta do
  increment_build_number
  build_ios_app
  testflight
end