iOS Adding a development device - How will it affect my phone?

[dabless]

Hi,
I was accepted into and paid for the iPhone Development Program. I was going through the steps of setting everything up and noticed this little bit.

" The device may only be used for development and testing purposes until that version of OS X iPhone is publicly released."

I only have one iPhone and am a lone developer. I need to be absolutely sure I can still use my iPhone for day to day calls, work, etc with the Development iPhone OS installed.

Can anyone provide first hand knowledge of how this affects an iPhone?

 

[tacoman667]

Hi,
I was accepted into and paid for the iPhone Development Program. I was going through the steps of setting everything up and noticed this little bit.

" The device may only be used for development and testing purposes until that version of OS X iPhone is publicly released."

I only have one iPhone and am a lone developer. I need to be absolutely sure I can still use my iPhone for day to day calls, work, etc with the Development iPhone OS installed.

Can anyone provide first hand knowledge of how this affects an iPhone?

I have been in the developer program since beta 3 and I used my iPhone for the "crash test dummy". I have never had an issue where my iPhone bricked although I would see small issues with bugs from the software which were fixed in the next beta version. Adding a development device now would not require you to istall beta OS on the phone now as the 2.0 version allows for installing apps and that was the main reason for the OS betas. I would suggest you go right ahead and use your phone unless you just upgraded to the new 3G iPhone, are not going to sell your old iPhone, and don't mind using the old iPhone for a development platform.

 

[gwerhart0800]

During the beta periosn, phones could be bricked ...

There was a point in the beta program when the beta OS timed out and Apple had not released a new version. For some of us, our phones were "bricked" for ~24 hours until Apple made a new OS drop. So, it can happen.

What is unclear now is if Apple will be releasing beta OS drops to the iPhone dev group before they drop for the public. If so, they may do the time-limited release thing again. It was also unclear if some of the beta builds were "debug" versions ... I say this because the size of the OS was larger, then seem to shrink for the last few versions. I also had apps get killed for running out of memory more frequently with the earlier beta OS releases.

While the risk of having a non-functional phone is lower now, I don't know that anyone can say that it is gone completely. I think the risk is low, but probably not zero.

 

[fat phil]

Hi,
I was accepted into and paid for the iPhone Development Program. I was going through the steps of setting everything up and noticed this little bit.

" The device may only be used for development and testing purposes until that version of OS X iPhone is publicly released."

I only have one iPhone and am a lone developer. I need to be absolutely sure I can still use my iPhone for day to day calls, work, etc with the Development iPhone OS installed.

Can anyone provide first hand knowledge of how this affects an iPhone?

The line you quote was for pre-2.0 release.

The SDK uses the public release OS now (as opposed to the beta OS releases prior to 11/7), so you shouldn't notice any difference, unless you're one of the lucky few who're noticing OS sluggishness - but that isn't related to your device being signed for development.