iPhone ad hoc distribution in a team environment

Question

I am a developer working on several iPhone apps. I am an administrator in our Apple dev portal team. The Agent of our team is NOT a developer. I understand that ONLY the Agent can request an ad hoc deployment cert, and prepare an app for ad hoc distribution.

I assume that the Agent can generate the certificate and pass them to me so that I can provision and build the app for ad hoc distribution, but I have read horror stories about using multiple certificates in xCode. Just getting set up for development testing on the device was complicated enough!

Has anyone dealt with this issue? What pitfalls are there in using multiple certs in xCode? I suppose that I would also need to have the Agents public and private key in my keychain.

Answer 1

It's not a nightmare, it can just get a little confusing, especially if you give your profiles unhelpful names like "distribution profile." If you expect to have multiple sets of profiles, certificates, and keys on your computer, make sure they are named so that you know what goes with what and belongs with what.

I posted some recommendations in this area a while ago.

My number one piece of advice is to give your private keys descriptive names. Fortunately, you can do this at any time in Keychain Access. By default they are simply named "Private Key" and if you lose the certs you'll have to resort to some openssl geekery to figure out which key goes with which.