Multiple iPhone Developer Accounts on One Mac?

Question

I have searched but cant find this question anywhere. My wife and I are about to take on iPhone development and we've only got the funds to purchase one iMac 24" to do this. Anyone out there with iPhone development experience know if two different Apple developer accounts can be profiled on one development Mac? Not only via the developer program but also does the XCODE (I believe it is) IDE support it?

What we're hoping to be able to do is that I can log in with my profile and developer/debug, etc my iPhone application and her do the same under her own profile (not seeing mine and vice-versa). Time sharing wont be an issue as I work from home while she works away from home and we'll be able to figure out that part no problem.

Please understand that we're both completely new to the Mac, OS X as well as the iPhone development arena and so we have no idea if this is possible. If not our second option would be to purchase two Mac Mini's (keyboards and mice too) and figure out some KVM to each of our existing PC's monitors that we already have, and develop that way. We would rather not and just share one iMac between two developer accounts and IDE profiles.

UPDATE: My wife and I invested in a 24" iMac from Best Buy utilizing a 12 month no-interest offer, which made it the choice over the 20" iMac. Its got plenty of RAM (4G out of 8G max) and HD space (640G) and we're getting used to the MAC OS X and will begin developing soon. We've created two OS X accounts, to keep settings and such separate. Either Windows moved closer to OS X or vice-versa as things on OS X seem quite intuitive and we were highly impressed at the whole un-box and setup time of about 8 minutes! So far, so good.

Answer 1

Sure. Just make two user accounts on the iMac. Easy!

Answer 2

That's one way. You can share the single copy of the /Developer tools, but each have your own login name, preferences, and keychains.

If you share the same Mac OS X user account, but have two ADC identities, on the Safari side you just have to make sure you log out of the ADC website when you trade places.

On the Xcode side, you'll need to add both Developer Certificates to your keychain, and both Provisioning Profiles to Xcode's organizer. I recommend that you each have your own phone, if you're going to have separate Provisioning Profiles and Developer Certificates.

The crucial part is that for each project you work on, you need to set the Code Signing Identity to the full and exact identity for the person who owns it. The projects come set up with a wildcard identity of "iPhone Developer"; you need to change it to "iPhone Developer—John Appleseed" to use your signing certificate and profile, and your wife has to do the same on her projects.

Answer 3

Also, if you copy an app from one developer account and try to use the identity and provisioning profile associated with the other account, it won't work. You'll have to quit XCode and edit the project.pbxproj file which you'll find inside the .xcodeproj bundle. Find every term next to CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY or PROVISIONING_PROFILE and delete the value in double quotes (leave the double quotes). Then restart XCode and select the provisioning profile in the Get Info's Build tab for both the main object in the upper left of Groups and Files, and also any and all Targets. Then it should work. Apparently, when an app has been build using a provisioning profile for one ADC account, XCode doesn't fix up all the information necessary to allow you to change to a different ADC account.

Answer 4

I have two iPhone developer accounts that I work with, so instead of two accounts and two people, it's two accounts and one person. Unfortunately, being the same person both accounts ended up with the same Agent name (and it appears nearly impossible to change this - my case requesting the change has been open with Apple for months).

This resulted in two sets of keys and certificates and the keys have the same name. This causes problems in Xcode, both in the Organizer and in code signing. I filed bugs on these 6635822) some time ago, but ended up just now finding a work-around for both problems. I wrote it down in a blog entry in case it'd be helpful to others.

http://geekanddad.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/work-around-for-multiple-iphone-dev-account-and-code-signing-and-xcode-organizer-problems/

Update: Jan 2010: it looks like Apple has addressed this with their certificate generation - User Names now seem to have a number appended to them in parenthesis (e.g., My Name (A340D)). I have not tried to regenerate certificates on previous accounts to see if they get this hash added, but newly created ones are having this added.

Update: Feb 12 2010: Yes, if you regenerate the certificate on the account it appends a number to the name and this whole issue is a non-issue. So you can just have one keychain and all your certificates there now - thanks apple!

Answer 5

Not sure why you'd need 2 computers for development considering you'd probably upload under one account right? Plus, you're married. Why would you not want to simply share? Besides, while developing apps, you can always add each others phones to the list of testers.

Answer 6

Hi,

When we uploaded our build to appstore we used one mac book. But when we are trying to update same app from iTunes, using different mac we are not able to successed. Saying "A valid siging identity matching this profile could not be found in your keychain."

I understood the problem is "we are not using the mac machine on which we created this distribution provision file using the keychain".

But right now we don't have that mac. What will be the possible solution. Can I create a fresh distribution provision file using same app id in new mac using new keychain certificate?

Please help...

Thanks Shiva