iPhone ad hoc distribution in a team environment

Question

I am a developer working on several iPhone apps. I am an administrator in our Apple dev portal team. The Agent of our team is NOT a developer. I understand that ONLY the Agent can request an ad hoc deployment cert, and prepare an app for ad hoc distribution.

I assume that the Agent can generate the certificate and pass them to me so that I can provision and build the app for ad hoc distribution, but I have read horror stories about using multiple certificates in xCode. Just getting set up for development testing on the device was complicated enough!

Has anyone dealt with this issue? What pitfalls are there in using multiple certs in xCode? I suppose that I would also need to have the Agents public and private key in my keychain.

Answer 1

The main issue is that you'll need the Agent to export the private key they used to generate a certificate request for on the portal. The portal has instructions for backing up and transferring that private key... only when you have that key on your system can you make use of the certificates they create for Ad-Hoc.

The docs at this point for the whole process are pretty good, but you must read through them very, very carefully and follow eery step to the letter.

Answer 2

You are expected to use separate development and distribution certificates; you actually set up different configurations for them. The "nightmare" comes when you use several different development certificates. If anyone touches the certificate setting on the Debug configuration, it must thereafter be set manually (which is a pain in the ass, of course).

So no, there's no problem with the Team Agent giving you his distribution certificate and private key (you'll need both). He needs to realize that Apple will hold him responsible for your distribution of packages, though.

Answer 3

It's not a nightmare, it can just get a little confusing, especially if you give your profiles unhelpful names like "distribution profile." If you expect to have multiple sets of profiles, certificates, and keys on your computer, make sure they are named so that you know what goes with what and belongs with what.

I posted some recommendations in this area a while ago.

My number one piece of advice is to give your private keys descriptive names. Fortunately, you can do this at any time in Keychain Access. By default they are simply named "Private Key" and if you lose the certs you'll have to resort to some openssl geekery to figure out which key goes with which.

Answer 4

You can use this amazing software to generate OTA AD-Hocs!

http://github.com/downloads/pcsaito/iOS-BetaBuilder/BetaBuilderDB.zip/