iPhone Provisioning: What's it all about?

Grepping around, I see that I'm not AT ALL alone in being... challenged... by the process of setting up an iPhone app, g开发者_运维技巧etting it to run, giving it my testers, and so on.

I've gotten it to work. Somehow I emailed a copy or two to testers, and eventually got my li'l app into the store, and that was fine.

But I can't say a really, deeply understand it! (And I don't do iOS dev every day. Even now my recollection of what I did is kind-of hazy.)

I'm moderately capable of understanding things, if presented, well, you know, in a way I can understand.

Can anyone point me to a crystal clear explanation of what provisioning actually is?

I feel that if I understood it, the recipes to do it would be obvious.

Thanks!

Development provisioning profiles sign your application, and allow the phone to know it's OK to run. These days, XCode automatically makes a Development Profile for you (the "Team Profile").

The other kind of profile, when you are talking about other people running you app, is a Distribution Profile. You need a Distribution profile for either giving your app to the store, or for giving to beta-testers.

The profile is what allows other people's phones to know it's OK to run your app, basically it includes a list of device ID's approved to run that application on the phone in question, along with being signed so that the phone knows the whole thing is valid.

If you read advice around the web concerning distribution, it's easy to get confused because things used to be a lot harder. You used to have to send Distribution certificates separately from your app to beta testers. These days the certificates are included in your app bundle so you don't have to worry about that.

Furthermore, sending an AdHoc build can be all kinds of unpleasant - for testers using Windows. These days, the absolute best way to do beta testing is have a link on the web that uses the Enterprise ad-hoc deployment feature, to let a user with iOS4 or higher automatically download and install your application with no iTunes or copying work at all. In fact I would at this point refuse to use beta testers running windows who were not on iOS4 or higher.

The guide link posted should have a section about the enterprise ad-hoc, but basically the way it works is there's a small plist file the phone downloads, that has a link to the IPA file containing your app. You point the phone to a specially formatted link to the plist file and the phone fetches the application directly.

All of this is predicated on using the "Build and Archive" option for building any ad-hoc distribution build. You should do that anyway because it also saves out a symbol file for you to use in debugging crash reports.

EDIT:

Here's a little more detail on enterprise deployment (which works for any registered developer, not just Enterprise registered developers):

http://jeffreysambells.com/posts/2010/06/22/ios-wireless-app-distribution/

The Developer Program User Guide should be helpful.