Mobile Development with Cordova (Phonegap): Appendix B

Appendix B: Generating a Provisioning Profile (iOS)

Your Apple developer career is managed by the Provisioning Portal. As described earlier, your key components are:

• A developer certificate
• An app ID, which is simply a logical grouping of applications
• A list of devices for beta testing
• A provisioning profile linking all of these together

Getting started:

• Log in to the Provisioning Portal
  https://developer.apple.com/
• Go into Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles
  If you don't already have a Certificate, generate one and load it onto your Mac.
  Make it a Production certificate, for "App Store and Ad Hoc"
• Defined an App ID.
  The simplest choice here is to make a wildcard matching your organization, e.g. org.greeninfo.* Using a wildcard will allow this provisioning profile to match multiple apps, as long as they start with org.greeninfo
• Enter the UDIDs for your beta tester devices
  Again, only devices listed here AND chosen for a Provisioning Profile can effectively beta test.
• Generate a Provisioning Profile
  Tie together your developer identity, your app, and those devices, into a single logical grouping.

When you're setting up your mobile app, you'll define a Team in Xcode, and Xcode will download your certificate and Provisioning Profile for you. You will find yourself doing this relatively often as project momentum builds and beta testers want to come on board. You will need to regenerate a provisioning profile and downloaded into Xcode every time. See the chapter about beta testers for more info.

Do not forget the 100 device limit. If you're doing apps for 5 or 6 companies, and each one wants 20 people to check out the app, you could run out of slots.