Prepare Your Site and Branded Assets

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Outline the tasks to complete before submitting information to Mobile Publisher.
Describe the difference between the distribution methods and distribution types in Mobile Publisher.

How It Works

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of how to create a branded version of your mobile app, let’s take a step back and review the overall process so you know what to expect.

Here are the basic steps.

Choose how you’d like to create a branded app. You can create a mobile app based on a fully branded Experience Cloud site, or to customize a Salesforce mobile app with your branding.
Sign up for Mobile Publisher. Contact your Salesforce representative for more information.
Design your branded assets.
Decide how to distribute your app. Distribute publicly or privately to your users? Submit your app for Apple or Google review or have Salesforce submit the app for review on your behalf? (More on this in the important App Distribution section.)
Create a verified corporate developer account with the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Submit your app’s information and branded assets to Mobile Publisher through Setup.
Receive a beta version of your app, and thoroughly test the beta.
Approve the app for submission to Apple and Google.
Dance a little jig when you see your app listed in the Apple App Store and Google Play. (OK, dancing is optional but highly recommended.)

After you publish your app, maintenance is a breeze. If your branding changes, you can make an unlimited number of edits with Mobile Publisher. And when Salesforce releases a new version of the Experience Cloud sites app or the Salesforce mobile app, the updates to your branded app are seamless.

Choose and Prepare the App or Site That You’re Branding

The process of creating your Mobile Publisher app begins with something you already have—an Experience Cloud site or the Salesforce mobile app.

Before you roll out an app to your employees and customers, evaluate your organization’s current mobile usage.

Have you customized your Experience Cloud site for mobile with the right standard or custom Lightning components to best serve your customers?
Are there ways you can customize the Salesforce mobile app so it’s tailor-made for your employees?

Be sure to spend time optimizing your Experience Cloud site or Salesforce mobile app implementation. We recommend that you fully develop and test any customizations you make to either source for your branded app.

Tip

To get the most out of your branded apps, earn your Experience Cloud Basics and Salesforce Mobile App Rollout badges on Trailhead.

DreamHouse Sets the Right Example

Let’s check in with D’Angelo Cunningham, our admin, as he streamlines the Experience Cloud site and the Salesforce mobile app prior to getting set up with Mobile Publisher.

To customize the Experience Cloud site, D’Angelo:

Customizes a theme to match DreamHouse Realty’s brand and style.
Builds custom Lightning web components that provide additional features to enhance the mobile user experience of the app.
Adds the components to the Experience Cloud site using Experience Builder. One of the features D’Angelo implements is the LocationService API so DreamHouse Realty customers can look up properties for sale near their location through the app.
Builds a custom search component to help customers search more effectively.
Tests the Experience Cloud site on his phone’s browser.

To customize the Salesforce mobile app, D’Angelo does the following.

Builds quick actions to speed up the brokers’ workflow.
Customizes the mobile navigation so that the landing page in the Mobile Only app is the Chatter feed. (Remember: The navigation you set up for the Salesforce mobile app in your org also applies to your branded app.)
Builds three new Lightning apps that are available from the navigation menu: House Explorer, Heat Map, and Property Explorer.

D’Angelo has been gathering feedback from the DreamHouse brokers and customers and making his final adjustments to the Experience Cloud site and Salesforce mobile app, and now he’s excited to forge ahead with Mobile Publisher.

Design Your Branded Assets

Creating your branded assets is the most important part of this process—and the most fun! Your company gets to dream up the visual appearance of your app.

You can apply your company’s branding to many of the elements in your app, including:

App name
App store icon
Mobile device icon
App header color
App loading screen color and image
App store listing information and screenshots

Work with a Designer

When you list your new app in the App Store and Google Play, millions of people worldwide can see it. And even though it’s probably only your employees who want to download it, you should put your best foot forward and work with a professional designer to create your visual assets. Depending on the size of your organization, your designer might collaborate with people in your marketing or PR departments to develop graphics and copy that align with your company’s brand.

Follow the Guidelines

Luckily, your organization isn’t the first to go through the process of publishing an app to the App Store and Google Play. To point you in the right direction, Apple and Google provide guidelines for all the design elements that make up your application store listing. We included links to those guidelines in the Resources section.

App Distribution

Before setting up your branded app, it’s important to understand how your app gets distributed. When you submit your app’s information to Mobile Publisher, we ask you about your app’s distribution method and distribution type.

The distribution method determines who submits your app for Apple or Google review. The options for distribution method are:

Binary upload: Salesforce builds and uploads the app to your store account. You submit the store listing information (screenshots, description, and so on) and manage the release of the app.
Fully managed: Salesforce builds, releases, and manages the lifecycle of the app.

The distribution type determines if your app is publicly or privately distributed to your users. The options for distribution method are:

Public distribution: Your branded app is published through your developer account to the public App Store or Google Play.
Private distribution: You manage the distribution of your branded app through your developer account privately. Your branded app is only accessible to your end users privately through your company’s mobile device management (MDM) catalog app, and isn’t publicly available on the App Store or Google Play.

Watch this video to learn important considerations about the distribution methods and distribution types.

In this unit, you learned how you can get your Experience Cloud site or Salesforce mobile app ready for Mobile Publisher and how you can design your branded assets. You also learned the differences between distribution methods and distribution types in Mobile Publisher. Follow along in the next unit as we cover how you get all your app’s information to Mobile Publisher for building your branded app.

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