Team Agents the only ones that can build Ad Hoc?

Question

First a little background. I am building a mobile app for a client, this client currently owns the developer account they wish to distribute the application from. Previously, I had been using my own developer account to build ad hoc to send milestone builds to the client. We are now getting close to ship and I have begun transferring the build to using the client's credentials.

Honestly, this is the first time I've worked on an app that was in my own developer account, so even setting up the dev cert/provisioning took some trouble shooting. Specifically, I couldn't use their existing developer certificate, but one that I created on my machine, uploaded and they approved. That's fine, I'm building locally to my device now.

However, (and here's my question) I ran into problems setting it up for them to do ad hoc distributions. Namely, installing their ad hoc certificate doesn't seem to work. My assumption is that it is because it wasn't build on my machine. However, there is no facility as a non-team agent to create my own Ad Hoc certificate.

Is it the case that only team agents can do Ad Hoc (and I'm assuming submission builds) from their machine? Is there no way that I as a Team Member can do an ad hoc build from my development machine?

Answer 1

When you generate a signing request in Keychain Utility (the first step of generating an Ad Hoc profile), it simultaneous generates a private key and saves it to your keychain. You can only build against the Ad Hoc provisioning profile if you have that private key in the Keychain on your Mac.

So your solutions are

1. Get them to export their private key from the keychain and send it to you. You then import it into your keychain. They should also send you the Ad Hoc mobileprovisioning file they created. You drag and drop this onto xcode.

2. Generate the signing request on your machine, and send it to them to generate a new Ad Hoc profile which will then only work on your Mac (though again, you could send them the private key).

3. The final option would be to send the source code to them to compile the Ad Hoc builds.

Answer 2

The Provisioning Portal Distribution How-To explicitly states:

Only Team Agents are authorized to prepare and submit applications for distribution.

Team Agents are also the only ones authorized to create an Ad-Hoc distribution profile.

However, once the distribution profile is created, the Team Agent should be able to download it and hand it off to you for creating Ad-Hoc distribution builds.