What happens if I don't renew my apple developer account? Will I be able to create new provisioning profiles or develop,run and test apps locally without submitting them to the app store?
You will still be able to develop applications and test on the local device (check the "Sign in with Apple ID" section)
https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/
Expired memberships
If your Apple Developer Program membership expires, your apps will no
longer be available for download and you won’t be able to submit new
apps or updates. You’ll lose access to prerelease software,
Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, and TSIs. However, your apps
will still function for users who have already installed or downloaded
them, and you will still have access to App Store Connect and free
development resources.
If your Apple Developer Enterprise Program membership expires, your
apps will no longer be available for download and they’ll no longer
function for those who have already installed or downloaded them. You
will, however, still have access to free development resources.
Thirty days before membership expiration, you’ll have the option to
download a copy of your registered test device list and/or opt in to
have all devices removed immediately upon expiration if you don’t plan
to renew membership. If you don’t opt in, all devices will be removed
automatically 180 days after membership expiration.
iOS Developer University Program memberships don’t expire.
https://developer.apple.com/support/renewal/
Related
My Apple Developer Membership is expiring and at the moment I don't want renew it, I would like to know what happens to the app (besides obviously to disappear from the App Store) the app in the account will be removed to? Can someone else create an app with the same name as mine?
I would like to know what happens to the app (besides obviously to disappear from the App Store) the app in the account will be removed to?
You apps won't be removed from developer account but will be removed from App store (it won't be visible/accessible to end-user).
Can someone else create an app with the same name as mine?
No
If your Apple Developer Program membership expires, your apps will no longer be available for download and you will not be able to submit new apps or updates. You will lose access to pre-release software, Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, and Technical Support Incidents. However, your apps will still function for users who have already installed or downloaded them, and you will still have access to iTunes Connect and free development resources.
if your Apple Developer Enterprise Program membership expires, your apps will no longer be available for download and will no longer function for those who have already installed or downloaded them. You will still have access to free development resources.
"Can someone else create an app with the same name as mine?"
NO
I've looked for hours at other similar questions, but not sure if the other answers apply in my case, and things have changed since I last did this:
I am a sole trader writing an iPad App for an Agency. The app is ultimately for a Company they are working for.
The app will be distributed free to a small number of employees in the Company (<30);
Its a hybrid app, much of the code running as javascript in a webview. Ideally I wish to avoid Apple review of the app during distribution as this is an unknown to me.
I also do not wish to release the source code to Agency nor Company.
What's my best option for distribution? Ad-hoc? Set Company up with an Enterprise account? VPP?
I would use Ad-hoc, as it seems simpler, but not sure what happens after 1 year expiration...
Be grateful for any pointers.
If you have Apple Developer Enterprise Program (299 USD/year)
Ad Hoc
You can distribute your app to limited number of registered devices, but you need to sign every year before your provisioning profile expires, if you don't sign your app again, it will start to crash on opening after expiration date.
In House
You can distribute your app without any device limit, but you need to sign your app every year.
If you have Apple Developer Program (99 USD/year)
Ad Hoc
Same as enterprise program
App Store
Once you submit and release your app, you don't need to sign again.
I think your best choice is distributing your app via App Store if the company is okey with it. Review process is not a big deal after all, you can shape your app according to rejections reasons.
Apple Developer program - Adhoc Distribution
Cheaper ($99)
No Appstore review needed
Supports up to 100 device (device list can be modified yearly)
Need to rebuild with updated provisioning profile when new device is added
Need to rebuild the app on yearly basis when provisioning profiles expire
OTA can be used to distribute the app to users
Enterprise Program - In-house Distribution
Expensive ($299)
App can be installed into any device without a device limit (no rebuilding required)
Need to rebuild the app on yearly basis when provisioning profiles / distribution certificate expire
No Appstore review needed
OTA can be used to distribute the app to users
I would go with Apple developer program since you user base is around 30 and its a cheaper option.
Have You looked at:
https://www.diawi.com/
Or
https://www.installrapp.com/
?
Note: You must register their devices to your Apple account first
We are building iOS apps for distribution in our own internal App Store using an Enterprise Developer Account from Apple. For building, we need to generate a provisioning profile, which expires 12 months from the creation. After expiration, the app doesn't work on the devices (crashes immediately because of expired Provisioning Profile), and each device needs to reinstall a new build of the app.
How can we provide our users an user friendly workflow in which they do not have to cope with crashing apps after 12 months?
Thanks in advance,
Bas
The expiration of provisioning profiles is a hassle with enterprise distributed apps. And it is something that will require ongoing maintenance from your internal development team, mobile support teams.
First, I want to point out that you don't mention certificates. Because they only expire every 3 years now (as of this writing - originally they expired every year), developers often forget about them. However, their expiration is actually more troublesome than the profiles. When a profile expires, you simply need to get another valid profile on the device. This can be done in multiple ways. You can use an mobile device management (MDM) solution to push just a new profile. Or if another app with a valid profile (that uses a wildcard ID) has been pushed to the device more recently, this can also get a valid profile on the device.
If the certificate expires, you will actually need to re-build the app with the new certificate. Old builds signed with the expired cert will not run unless. Technically, you can resign the old IPA, but the main thing to note is that the actual binary is invalid and will not work until a new binary with a proper code signing is generated. Fortunately this is only every 3 years, so it is less frequent, but I can almost promise you when it happens you will have a mess on your hands if you don't plan for it. Again, as with the provisioning profile, you could handle this by using MDM to push something new to the device. In this case, you would use MDM to actually replace the while app, not just the profile. A little more work, but it could be done.
Of course, there are reasons you may not want to use MDM. Cost could be a concern. Employees may not want the company to manage their personal devices (if these apps are going on personal devices). Ability to manage the MDM infrastructure / workload. If MDM is not a great solution for your organization, I would recommend another approach that isn't as ideal from a user experience, but could solve your problem. You could built your apps to be self-updating. In other words, on launch, your app checks a server to see if a new version is available. If so, it prompts the user to update. This wouldn't require the device to be managed, and you could easily build a shared framework to make this easy for app developers. One downside to this approach is if the user doesn't launch the app between the time you post the new version (with new profile / cert) and the time the profile or cert expires, the app will not launch, so the auto-update functionality can't run to tell the user to get a new version. It will just appear to the user as if the app is crashing. That is the one UX problem with this approach. But if you can manage that, it can provide an alternative to the MDM route.
You can manage this with an MDM server. Essentially the workflow looks something like this:
User installs MDM Profile and Accepts the prompts to allow the MDM Server to install apps.
The MDM Server is able to manage the device according to the permissions set in the MDM Profile. Apps managed by the MDM Server can then be installed and removed arbitrarily.
A quick google search for iOS MDM Server should get you headed in the right direction. Pricing for various paid options is somewhere around $15 / device / year, last time I looked into this (about a year ago). But there are one or two reasonable open source MDM Servers available as well.
A few years ago I wrote an iPad app that was to run on only a few of the client's iPads. They're currently having issues with the app exiting upon being opened. It turns out this is due to the dev provisioning profile associated with the app being expired.
I tried renewing the provisioning profile but am unable to access the Provisioning Portal because my dev account needs to be renewed. Renewing my account is not an option right now.
I'm aware that as of Xcode 8 users are able to install apps on physical devices for free. I don't have access to the client's iPads and have been issuing out updates by archiving the .ipa file and using diawi.com for them to install.
How can I just renew my provisioning profile so that my client can successfully open the app?
Thanks
This is not possible. What you need to do is generate a new, valid provisioning profile and run the app again on your client's iPad. However, I should note that for this type of development, Apple wants you to use ad-hoc distribution through the enterprise developer program.
Also, to be able to generate a new, valid provisioning profile you will need a valid account.
Ideally, your client should have their own developer account that they maintain, preferably an enterprise dev account (enterprise accounts don't require them to manage the specific device UDIDs the app needs to run on). With that, they could manage their own certs / profiles for the signing of the app. They could then grant you access as a team member to manage those things and update the app once a year.
Or, even better for them - you could even write them a script / use tools (like fastlane) to re-sign the app themselves so they could self provision. This takes you out of the loop for ongoing support, since it doesn't seem like you will / have provided ongoing support. Keeping an internal app running requires continual work (new OS updates, code signing expiration, etc.).
If you built an app for a client, you probably should have known / let them know that iOS doesn't allow unsigned apps to run on devices, and that developer provisioning profiles last at most a year. You also need to make sure they know you can't just write a native app and expect it to work forever. At some point (probably now, but they don't know it yet) an iOS update is going to break something you did in the app. The just can't see what is broken yet because your invalid cert is making it so the app can't launch. Given your lack of understanding of iOS code signing, I would assume that you likely did something in your code that was broken in subsequent iOS updates (given that very experienced iOS developers also have things break with new iOS versions are released).
At this point, I would explain them the situation and see if they would be willing to set up their own paid account (only $299 / year for an enterprise account) to get new profiles / certs set up to get the app back up and running.
Googling this topic I get a sense there are three ways apple allows to distribute the app to end user. However it's still quite vague how exactly each one of these methods actually work and differ.
Ad Hoc Distribution - how does this really work. does this method not require the app to be submitted on app store ? If Yes , then where will the user download the app from and how the installation procedure works.
In-House Distribution - how does this work ? some text i came across suggests we can host the app on a private enterprise server and allow users install from there. If this is true apple would have no way to regulate the app.. not so clear.
App Store deployment - this one i understand how it works as a consumer of some apps i have purchased from app store. In this case the app will have to be submitted to app store first and then available for any number of users to install.
The other question I had on the same context is to be able to deploy the app via one of the ways what type of dev license is required to be procured from apple ?
Ad Hoc Distribution - This is most commonly used for sending the applications to beta testers, you register their UDID in your Developer Portal and then send them the app bundle and a provisioning profile. They drag these into iTunes and can install the application.
In-House Distribution - If I recall correctly this is only available if you have Enterprise license, you can deploy this app to all devices associated with that account (so all of your companies phone for example)
App Store Distribution - This is when your app ends up in the App Store, you submit it to Apple after code signing it, then they review and it gets accepted.
Hopefully that clears things up a bit for you.
For distribution methods 1 & 3 you must have paid the $99 developer fee, number 2 you must have paid $299 (I think that's the right price) for the enterprise developer license.
For the Ad-Hoc thing: You can add up to 100 devices per year to your dev portal. Those 100 devices are then able to install specially signed Apps from you.
To add a device to your portal you need it's UDID. To distribute an App via Ad-Hoc you need to create a special Ad-Hoc distribution profile for the App, sign it with this profile and then send the compiled .app file bundled with the profile to your users. They will then be able to install the app via iTunes, just like they've downloaded it from the App Store.
Note: Removing a previously added device from the list does not increase the device count by.
That's pretty much it, am not familiar with in-house distribution.
Apple's definition of "in-house" distribution basically means: buy an enterprise developer account.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/apps/in-house/resources.html