Creating an iOS (iPhone) Provisioning Profile/Certificate

One of the hardest parts in developing for iOS is the total mess they made with their overly complex certificate/provisioning process. Relatively for the complexity the guys at Apple did a great job of hiding allot of the crude details but its still difficult to figure out where to start.

Start by logging in to the iOS provisioning portal

 

In the certificates section you can download your development and distribution certificates.

 

In the devices section add device id's for the development devices you want to support. Notice no more than 100 devices are supported!

Create an application id, it should match the package identifier of your application perfectly!

 

Create a provisioning profile for development, make sure to select the right app and make sure to add the devices you want to use during debug.

 

Refresh the screen to see the profile you just created and press the download button to download your development provisioning profile. 

Create a distribution provisioning profile, it will be used when uploading to the app store. There is no need to specify devices here.

 

Download the distribution provisioning profile.

We can now import the cer files into the key chain tool on a Mac by double clicking the file, on Windows the process is slightly more elaborate

We can export the p12 files for the distribution and development profiles through the keychain tool

In the IDE we enter the project settings, configure our provisioning profile, the password we typed when exporting and the p12 certificates. It is now possible to send the build to the server.