What are the iPhone app-name restrictions? (And [where] are they documented?!)

Question

It took me 2 days (and a lot of head/wall pounding) to finally discover that the reason ad-hoc distribution wasn't working for me was because my app-name had UTF-8 characters. I'm still boggling over how such a widely international platform like the Apple iPhone can prohibit this.

i.e., if my app were a Chinese game of Go, am I not allowed to call it "Go! (圍棋)"?!

Anyway, I'm wondering...

• Is this an actual limitation, or a bug in the ad-hoc process?
• Are there other restrictions on app-name (perhaps chars that don't play well with unix, like ?, *, !, &, etc.)
• Is any of this documented, anywhere? (If so, where :)
• Can anyone point to an example of an app in the app-store with UTF-8 chars (particularly Japanese/Chinese) in the name?

Thanks!

(I know: it looks like several questions, but they really are all related!)

Answer 1

OSX in general supports UTF8 natively, throughout Cocoa to the Filesystem.

An example in 日本語: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=294753911&mt=8

If I had to guess, you probably have to name your application something in ASCII but you can make the application title UTF8. Not sure though.

Answer 2

Have you tried the CFBundleDisplayName key in Info.plist?

Answer 3

Turns out (according to DTS), it's a bug in the way iTunes handles ad-hoc distribution. This problem is specific to ad-hoc -- my developer distribution works fine, and I'm told the app-store will handle it fine, too -- it's just ad-hoc distribution (the common mechanism for things like beta-testing.)

In part, DTS's response was:

"I've been able to reproduce it. I've also confirmed it only appears to be an issue for Ad Hoc distribution, so I'm inclined to believe it's a bug in iTunes (I tested in 8.0.1, the latest).

I'm awaiting a ruling from iPhone OS engineering on this, but I would recommend you file a bug with your test case app."

(Hey, do I get to vote-up my own answer? Is that cheating? :D)

(Answer: no you can't. So I guess it would be ;)