Do I need to make an Ad Hoc Provisioning Profile to debug my app on my iPhone?

Question

I suppose the title of my question says it all :-) I think I'm just cloudy on how debugging works on a real device - is that how to go about it? I've been reading through Apple's docs on creating provisioning profiles for distribution, but I'm not finding any information for simply debugging my app, which is running on my device, through Xcode. Can someone point me in the right direction?

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Edit (2/19/09): I'm getting conflicting answers on whether or not I need to create an ad-hoc provisioning profile to debug my app. If I don't need to create an ad-hoc provisioning profile, what else do I have to do to debug my app, other than having my development provisioning profile and certificate for myself?

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Edit (2/20/09): This link, iPhone Development Guide: Preparing Devices for Development, seems to say that you do need a development provisioning profile for debugging on a device. In my last edit, I mentioned that I was getting conflicting answers on whether or not I need to create an ad-hoc provisioning profile. The answers are not conflicting, I just didn't understand the difference between an ad-hoc provisioning profile and a development provisioning profile.

Answer 1

You need to provision the device, yes. IIRC you need to use Apple's online tool, and then provision it using Xcode, after which you will be able to debug it on the device.

See the first post on this blog for more.

Answer 2

No, you don't need an Ad Hoc provisioning profile to debug an app, you only need a development provisioning profile and certificate for yourself on your device.

Answer 3

Any time you're writing software to be installed on an iPhone, you need two things: a key and a provisioning profile. The key identifies the person who developed the application; it stays on your computer and is used to sign the apps you build. The profile identifies which devices are allowed to run applications signed by a given key; it needs to be installed onto the device.

Distribution keys are basically one per company, and are only meant to be used when you are building a version of an app that's intended to be distributed outside your development team. (App Store builds must be signed with a distribution key.) Development keys are intended to be one per developer, but are only meant to be used when actively developing an app.

(If you are an individual developer, of course, you have only one developer key and one distribution key. On my machine, I've set up Keychain to require a password for the distribution key, so even if somebody steals my laptop they can't release an update to one of my apps that compromises user security. The developer key, which can only install software onto my personal phone, is not passworded.)

When you're testing on your own personal device and installing through Xcode, you need a development provisioning profile and a development key. This development profile should be installed into Xcode, which will then install it onto your phone.

When you're distributing to a small number of others (for example, for beta testing, or if you wrote an app that's specialized for a specific customer), you need an ad-hoc profile and a distribution key. You'll need to send the ad-hoc profile to the user along with the app. The user can then drop both the profile and app into iTunes and sync their phone to install.

When you're distributing through the App Store, you need an App Store profile and a distribution key. Builds made in this way cannot be run on any device you control, but Apple's submission tools require them to be built using this profile.

So to answer your question: You need to provision your device, but it has to be a development provisioning profile, not an ad-hoc profile.