Titanium SDK ↔ Appcelerator Cloud Build: Why does local SDK path resolution fail in production?

Titanium SDK ↔ Appcelerator Cloud Build: Why does local SDK path resolution fail in production?

When building a Titanium application locally with the CLI, the tiapp.xml can reference a sdkPath that points to a custom SDK installation. The same project, when submitted to Appcelerator Cloud Build, ignores this attribute and attempts to resolve the SDK from its own build nodes. This mismatch leads to “SDK not found” or “API key validation” failures that do not appear during local builds.

The goal is to determine whether the cloud build service should honor the sdkPath defined in tiapp.xml or enforce a strict SDK version policy. The uncertainty lies in the documented behavior: the SDK documentation states that sdkPath is optional and only used by the local CLI, yet several community posts report that the cloud build silently overrides it.

Key constraints:

• Local builds use Titanium SDK 8.3.0 with a custom API key placeholder.
• Production builds run on Appcelerator Cloud Build nodes that enforce strict API key validation.
• Code signing credentials are absent locally but present in the cloud environment.

Unresolved questions:

• Does Appcelerator Cloud Build intentionally ignore sdkPath in tiapp.xml, or is this a configuration oversight?
• What is the documented fallback mechanism for SDK resolution when sdkPath is missing during cloud builds?
• Should the SDK provide a CLI flag to force cloud builds to use a specified SDK version, or rely on environment variables?