iOS developer certificate

Question

I'm reading the documentation for getting a iOS developer certificate but I'm finding it difficult to understand how it works.

I'm developing some iOS applications for my company, and now I need to deploy on a real device. I know I need this certificate, but there's something not completely clear to me even after reading the documentation: if I get a certificate, will I be able to deploy on a single specific device, or with my certificate I will be able to deploy and test on any device my company will give to me?

Another question: will this certificate be usable only on my mac, or on any mac my company will provide to me? I suppose I'll use my personal mac to work, but it is even possible my company will assign another one in the future, so this is relevant for me.

Another third question: the documentation cites the situation of a team working on an application, but it is not clear if any developer will need his personal certificate. Can more than one developer work with the same certificate on any device?

Thanks for any clearing!

Solution 1

if I get a certificate, will I be able to deploy on a single specific device, or with my certificate I will be able to deploy and test on any device my company will give to me?

Your developer certificate allows you to provision any apps made by you, onto any device you choose. Just add devices' UDIDs as you receive them, assign provisioning profiles to these devices, and you should be able to install them onto the devices you chose.

will this certificate be usable only on my mac, or on any mac my company will provide to me?

There are instructions on how to export your certificate and public/private keys on your Mac and transfer them to other Macs that you plan to code on. I believe it's in the user guide PDF that you can download from the provisioning portal home page. After you import those into your other Macs, install your provisioning profiles onto Xcode Organizer on those Macs. After that's done, Xcode can sign and install your apps.

Not sure about your third question though, I'm a lone wolf.

Solution 2

You should get a certificate for your company - that will allow you to distribute apps for anyone in the company, without putting them up on the App Store. You'll need to provide details of your company to Apple as part of the signup process.

Once you have an account you create a developer certificate with a private key generated on your mac. You can copy that private key between company developers and share the certificate.

Then you also need provisioning profiles as well, everyone can have a separate developer account and share them, or you could probably share a single AppleID for development. But you should have a distribution certificate created only from the master account, that is what is used to sign the application bundle users can download.

Also be aware there's a great mechanism for distribution where you can put a link on a web page that a user can browse to from a device, and install it directly on the device without going through iTunes. That requires iOS 4.0+, but it avoids such insane headaches in distribution that it is a must-have requirement for any business app you develop (and it also means you can use many more advanced API's and blocks).