Essential iOS Build and Release

Chapter 3. iOS Devices and Provisioning Profiles

For those who are part of the iOS Developer Program, a large part of the iOS build and release process is the setup of iOS devices for testing. In Chapter 2, we covered setting up your App ID and certificates. This chapter focuses on the next two steps required for distributing an app: adding iOS devices to your Devices list on the iOS Provisioning Portal, and the creation of the Provisioning Profiles that are used to sign and run your app on a device, or package it for distribution to the App Store. We’ll also go over several of the caveats and potential pitfalls that come along with adding iOS devices to the Devices list.

iOS Device Provisioning

Building and running your app on the iOS Simulator (installed with Xcode) is the quickest and easiest way to verify that your app compiles and runs without error. However, it is essential that you install your app onto an iOS device for testing, in order to verify app functionality with the actual hardware architecture and memory constraints of a device. This is especially true if you need to test a hardware-specific application function, such as the camera. At a high level, the process of preparing an iOS device (at the time of this writing, this includes the iPad, iPad mini, iPhone, and iPod touch) so that it can run your app means you’ll have to add the device to your Devices list, modify any Provisioning Profiles to include the device, and load the Provisioning Profile(s) onto the device. ...