Full FeedApp Store Development Part 2: Provisioning and Ad Hoc
A while back I wrote about my initial experience with the iPhone SDK and developing on that platform. It’s been a while since then, and I’ve learned a lot. In that time, I had finished my first app, and it came time for me to get some beta testers to make sure it worked on more than just my iPhone 3G. The Ad Hoc distribution process is certainly not as easy as it could be, but I think once you figure it out, it’s easy to crank out apps for beta testers.
In order to make an app available through Ad Hoc or the App Store, you need to create Provisioning Profiles for users. These profiles can be downloaded from the iPhone Developer Portal. In order for it to work, the profile contains both the UDID (a 40 digit hex code) of the beta tester as well as the App ID, just another thing used by Apple to make sure the tester and app is legit. Once that is downloaded, it must be placed on the device that the developer uses for testing. He/She then builds the application with XCode (assuming there are no errors) and sends a zipped .app file to the testers along with the Provision Profile. With those two things, all the tester has to do is drag and drop into iTunes, and then sync. As I mentioned, after the first time, it becomes super easy.
That said, there are a couple of downsides. Sometimes (and this may be just me) the app doesn’t want to accept the profile you have created, and it throws a fit when you try to run it on your iPhone. Due to this exact error, I have had to restore my phone twice in about three weeks in order to start fresh with the profiles to get it to work. I’ve searched the web for solutions, but that seemed to be the only one that worked for me.
All in all, this part of developing is the fun part; it means your app is getting closer to being launched. You may spend a lot of time trying to get it right the first time, but Apple offers great guides, and there are plenty of forums for help along the way. I’ll keep you posted with my final wrap-up when the time comes. Currently, I have had two apps accepted, and am waiting on a third. However, none will appear in the App Store just yet, as my bank and tax information have not been cleared.
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Josh, I’m getting a weird problem with my beta-testers device where he’s able to sync/install my Ad Hoc build just fine. When when he tries to launch the app on his device, it just fails back to the home screen again. The same build runs fine on both of my devices. But fails on both of his devices, in the same way. There’s no crash log produced. The console log (I had him run XCode to capture this) says the app failed to start, apparently due to “Permission denied”, but I didn’t see any more detail about it.
Does this sound similar to what you experienced?
Please share what you can, I’ve tried about a dozen different magic incantations and nothing has solved this so far.
thanks!
Mike
on April 13, 2009 at 02:50 PM - LINKHey Mike,
Did you send him the Ad Hoc provisioning profile that he needs? It may be checking for that and not finding it. I myself haven’t run into this issue but that could be the problem.
on April 13, 2009 at 04:21 PM - LINK