Building iOS CI Without the Framework Tax

iOS teams often default to heavy CI frameworks like Fastlane, but this approach shows how to build a production-ready TestFlight pipeline with only native xcodebuild tools—drastically reducing maintenance overhead and dependency chains. The technique of extracting provisioning profile UUIDs directly from the build archive and injecting them at export time is particularly elegant, solving the brittleness problem of hardcoded credentials and the cascading issues of certificate renewals. For small teams and side projects, it demonstrates a compelling case: lightweight, dependency-free CI that's often preferable to adding another framework abstraction layer.