iPhone® Application Development All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Death, Taxes, and iPhone Provisioning

In This Chapter

• Running your application on the iPhone

• Getting the app ready for distribution

• Taking the app to market — that is, the App Store

Benjamin Franklin once said, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Here's another certainty in this earthly vale of tears: Everybody has the same hoops to jump through to get an app onto an iPhone and then into the App Store — and nobody much likes jumping through hoops, but there they are.

So you're working on your app, running it in the Simulator, as happy as a virtual clam, and all of a sudden you get this urge to see what your creation will look like on the iPhone itself. Assuming that you've joined the requisite developer program (see Chapter 3 of this minibook), what do you have to do to get it to run on the iPhone?

For most developers, getting their apps to run on the iPhone during development can be one of the most frustrating things about developing software for the iPhone. The sticking point has to do with a technical concept called code signing, a rather complicated process designed to ensure the integrity of the code and positively identify the code's originator. Apple requires all iPhone apps to be digitally signed with a signing certificate — one issued by Apple to a registered iPhone developer — before the app can be run on a development system and before they're submitted to the App Store for distribution. This signature authenticates the identity ...