Is it possible to share an Apple Developer Program license between programmers?

Question

A couple of friends and I are working on a project for our final thesis that will run in the Iphone, and we're looking at the prospect of purchasing an Apple Developer Program License.

I'd like to know if we could purchase a license between the three of us, and still be able to deploy to the iphone individually. That is, each of us would configure their xcode to use this certificate and deploy locally.

I'm aware that this "hypothetical" scenario is probably illegal, but would there be any real, tangible problems in doing so?

Answer 1

Yes. Just create a certificate for each of your members, and create an APP ID / provisioning profile for each of your apps/devices. Using ad hoc deployment you can test and deploy to up to 100 devices (shared between your 3 people of course). Of course you can only use the registered developer's name when you deploy to the app store, but that should not be an issue if you're just testing locally.

Answer 2

Yes, it will work fine to deploy locally and for adhoc distribution, so that everyone has their own certificate and key and you register all of these in the dev program as "developers".

To deploy to the App Store, Apple has restricted this to only one person, they call it the "team agent" or such. Technically, this means that there can be only one private key and certificate who can sign apps for app store distribution. But you can generate this in one computer and then use Keychain to export the key and import it into other computers so other people can sign apps with the same key.

Just make sure that you understand the legal implication of doing this: whatever you do, there will be one person in the end who is responsible for everything in Apple's eyes.