Setting up your Branded App: the configurator step by step

In this article you will learn which steps the Brand Configurator takes you through, what you need to have ready before you start, and what happens once you submit.

Contents

• Before you start
• Steps 1 to 4: branding
• Steps 5 and 6: store accounts and access
• Step 7: API Keys
• Steps 8 to 11: configuration and submission
• After you submit

Fast lane

1. Create two developer accounts: one for the Apple Developer Program, one for the Google Play Console. Both must be organisation accounts, not personal ones.
2. Invite us as an administrator into both accounts: whitelabel@mysports.com for Apple, android@mysports.com for Google.
3. Secure a domain whose DNS and nameserver settings you can change yourself.
4. Have six values ready for step 7: Apple Team ID, API Key Issuer ID, API Key ID, the key file for API Key, your Google Developer ID and the service account key for Google Service Account Private Key.
5. You do not need an app in your store accounts. We create it after you submit.
6. Work through the configurator in order. You cannot skip a step, and step 7 is checked against Apple and Google while you are in it.

Before you start

Permission: Brand management, in the roles screen under the tab Member App & Web in the group Brand Configurator

Where to find the configurator: MySports / Branded Member Platform / Brand configurator. The same page lists every brand configuration you have started with its current status, and you create a new one at the top right.

The configurator has eleven steps and shows your position in the dialog subtitle, for example Step 1 of 11. You move forward one step at a time and each step is validated before you can continue, so it is worth having everything ready rather than starting and stopping.

What has to be in place before the configurator can be completed:

• Your company must not be a sole proprietorship.
• The Branded Member Platform must be activated for your account.
• An Apple Developer Program account for your company. Enrolment requires a D-U-N-S number and is verified by Apple, which can take several days.
• A Google Play Console account for your company, with a one-time registration fee.
• A domain, either a main domain or a subdomain, whose DNS and nameserver settings you can configure. Not every registrar allows this. If your domain is managed through Wix, you will need a different registrar or an additional domain.

Both store accounts must be organisation accounts. A personal developer account cannot be used, and switching an existing one later is not possible without starting the enrolment again.

Once both accounts exist, you invite us into them as an administrator. That access is what lets us build and publish your app in your name later on.

Two articles walk you through the enrolment if you do not have the accounts yet: creating an App Store account and creating a Google Play Store account.

Steps 1 to 4: branding

These four steps cover how your app looks and which languages its store entry uses. Nothing here depends on Apple or Google, so you can fill them in straight away. The preview on the right updates as you type.

Step 1, Name & Logo. Your app name, up to 30 characters, and your logo.

• The logo must be an SVG file and must stay under 512 KiB.
• The two restrictions that most often cause a rejected upload are not about size: the SVG must contain no <style> element and no embedded image. Exporting from a design tool frequently produces both. Use inline styling and a genuine vector file.
• You also choose the background colour the logo is rendered on, either from the picker or as a HEX value.

Step 2, App login screen. A background image for the login screen. Your logo is carried over from step 1 automatically.

• The image must be exactly 1024 x 2048 pixels. This is enforced.
• It must also stay under 512 KiB. A PNG at that resolution usually exceeds the limit, so use JPEG.

Step 3, Slogan & Colors. Your slogan, up to 30 characters, shown in the app next to your logo, and your primary, secondary and neutral colours. In the preview you also decide whether the app uses a light or a dark background.

Step 4, Language settings of the app store entry. The languages your store entry is created in. The configurator offers thirteen, covering German, English, Dutch, French and Italian in their regional variants. Spanish and Polish are not among them. If you operate internationally, choosing several languages here lets you prepare the store texts for each of them in the next step.

Steps 5 and 6: store accounts and access

Step 5, App store information, is where you enter the texts that appear on your store entry. Three fields with their own limits:

• Subtitle, up to 30 characters. Your slogan from step 3 works well here.
• Keywords, up to 100 characters. These decide whether members find your app when they search the stores.
• Description, up to 4000 characters.

Emojis are not allowed in any of the three and will be rejected.

Step 6, App store setup, is where you confirm that you have invited us into both store accounts. You tick one checkbox per store, and each one names the address to invite:

• Apple App Store: whitelabel@mysports.com, with the Admin role
• Google Play Store: android@mysports.com, with the administrator role

Send both invitations before you reach this step. You confirm them here, but the access has to exist for the later steps to work. Detailed instructions are in our Help Center for Apple and for Google.

Step 7: API Keys

This is the step most configurations stall on, so it is worth understanding what it wants. Before you start, your Google Play developer account needs API access, which means creating a Google Cloud project and enabling the Google Play Developer API for it. Google documents both in its getting started guide, and we cover the key creation in detail for Apple and for Google.

Step 7 collects six values, four for Apple and two for Google:

The two Apple identifiers live in different places, which is the most common mix-up on this step. The API Key Issuer ID sits in App Store Connect on the Integrations page, above your key list:

The Apple Team ID is not in App Store Connect at all. You find it in your Apple Developer account under Membership details:

App Store Connect and the Play Console appear in whichever language your account is set to. The labels on your screen may therefore be translated, even though they are quoted in English here.

Three things about this step regularly cause confusion.

You do not select an app here, and you do not need one. The keys are created at account level, not per app, and the configurator never asks for an app. Your app is created after you submit your configuration.

The keys are checked immediately. When you continue, we contact Apple and Google to confirm the credentials work. If anything is wrong you see Api Key validation failed and cannot move on. The message is the same for every cause, so check each of the six values rather than assuming something is missing on our side.

Attach both key files on your first pass through this step. If you save the configuration as a draft without them and come back later, the upload fields are no longer offered.

Apple only lets the account owner create an API key, and the same key can be reused if you set up further branded apps. Store it securely and pass it to us only through the configurator, because it grants administrator access to your store account.

Apple lets you download the key file only once and keeps no copy. If you lose it, the key cannot be recovered: revoke it and generate a new one, which gives you a new API Key ID to enter here. The name and the access level of a key also cannot be changed after it has been generated.

Steps 8 to 11: configuration and submission

Step 8, Branded Website configuration. Six fields, and two of them need preparation.

The location code picks the studio your branded platform belongs to. The list only offers codes that exist and are assigned to a studio, so if it comes up empty the assignment is missing rather than the code. This article explains how to create one.

The domain is where your branded website will be reachable. You need access to its DNS management in order to configure the nameservers, and you choose one of two routes:

• A subdomain of your existing website. If your site is studio.com, then my.studio.com, your.studio.com or members.studio.com all work.
• A new main domain, independent of your current website, for example mystudio.com. This one must still be available, so check before you enter it.

We validate the domain automatically. If it is rejected, the most common reasons are a domain that is already taken or a subdomain that does not resolve to something we can configure. Enter the plain domain without a protocol and without an additional path. Setting up DNS entries for your branded Member Web explains which records you will need to add afterwards.

The remaining fields are a contact email address, which is shown in the app stores and on your website, and a contact phone number.

Step 9, Test user. You confirm that a facility code and a test account exist so that Apple's and Google's reviewers can log in and see your app working. Both stores reject apps whose login they cannot get past, which makes this step easy to underestimate.

The test account is matched on email address, date of birth and facility code together. If the match fails, the configurator reports that no member was found under the specified facility code, which usually means the date of birth does not line up rather than the account being absent.

Use exactly these values, and create the lead under Prospects / Overview with Create lead:

The email address and the date of birth have to match exactly, because they are two of the three values the check runs on. The two names are not checked, but keep them anyway. They are a convention that makes the account recognisable in the member list, so that nobody deletes it by accident and so that we can find it when we prepare your store submission.

The facility code for this is named Branded App. Creating a facility code and a test user for the Branded App walks through both the code and the account, including the address details.

The test account must never be deleted and has to sit in a studio that appears in your branded app.

Step 10, Legal information. Your official company name including its legal form, plus four links: imprint, privacy policy, terms and conditions, and a support page. They appear in the footer of your branded website.

All four links are checked automatically, and the check opens the pages. They must be reachable without a login and must genuinely be the document they claim to be. A privacy policy that does not state what data is collected, for what purpose, how cookies and third-party tools are used and what rights members have will be flagged. PDF links are rejected, so use a web page.

Step 11, Confirmation. A summary of everything you entered. Check it carefully, because these settings cannot be changed after submission. Submitting here starts the work on our side.

After you submit

Submitting ends your part of the configuration and starts ours. We validate your data, send you DNS records to add, publish your branded website once those records resolve, and then build your app and send you test links before it goes to the stores.

You can follow the progress as a status on the configurator overview: Draft while you are still working, then Processing, then Waiting for DNS configuration, and finally Available with a link to your website. If the status turns into a request to contact support, something needs our attention and we will need the configuration name from you.

Until you submit, no app exists in your Apple or Google account. That is expected, and it is why there is nothing to select at step 7.

Note: This article was created with the help of artificial intelligence and editorially reviewed.