iOS Specifics of the Developer Program

[Earendil]

I've been around Apple's developer site for an hour now and can not find a concrete answer to my question. I'm hoping someone who has been all the way through the ropes has seen or figured out the answer to my situation.

Situation:
4 CS students with Apple computers.
All four have recently purchased or inherited iPhones/iPodTouchs.
All four want to develop software for the iPhone as a group, for education/fun and perhaps, time and innovation depending, produce a complete product that could be given away.

We are not a formal and state registered company.
Since we don't all "got to work", but live in different houses/dorms, we want to be able to use our own computers and devices to develop our software.

What do we sign up for to allow for this? Do we have to register as a company? If we do, do we have to be a state licensed company in order to do so?
Can we register as an "Individual" and be allowed more than one device/computer to develop on?

I can't find the answers to these questions on Apple's site. The specific restrictions for each type of signup just aren't clear

Thanks guys,
~Tyler

 

[kingofmalkier]

I can't 100% answer your question, but I can tell you that if you sign up as a company they will ask you for proof that you are that company. Technically, in my case they just waited for 2 weeks until I called them, and then they asked for proof.

Here in Massachusetts, it cost me 50 bucks to get a "Doing Business As" certificate that is good for 4 years. This effectively forms a sole proprietorship owned by the person who filed the certificate. Apple wanted that, a phone number, and a "valid company URL" in order to believe me that I was the company I claimed to be. They actually hung up and called me back at the same number I called them from to verify the phone number, it was hilarious. If all of that sounds like too much work/money I would check out this page: http://developer.apple.com/contact/phone.html

Call them up and ask if people enrolled as an individual can still issue provisioning profiles to more than one team member. That's required for different people to build on and run on the phone itself. My guess would be that Apple will want you to have a company setup if you want more than one profile, but I don't actually know.

 

[Brendan.Porter]

As a developer, I can set up independent provisioning profiles (read: put the App you're developing on the device for testing) for n number of devices.

This basically means that you can set yourself up as a single developer ($99), then delegate provisioning profiles to your developers. Getting Xcode and the SDK requires a free registration by each developer.

Then you can act as a set of independent developers or collaborate on a single project, with one person as the 'agent' (Apple's terminology for the lead developer). You can then use ad-hoc distribution to move the App to the devices (I haven't done this, as I am developing solo).

From what I can see of your situation you can do what you want for $99 and a few hours of setup.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading every word of the documentation (developer.apple.com/iphone), as it is an involved process to say the least, but not impossible.

Hope that helps,
Brendan

 

[Earendil]

Thank you both for you time.

That gives me a little more hope for the situation.
There isn't a Student option for the iPhone dev program, and though $99 isn't all that much, $99 per person would be, and even more so would be a ton of extra hassle to register and pay for an official company title, when what we really want is to educate ourselves, and see what comes out of it.

We would be happy just being able to write apps and put them on our own phone, that would be dandy, no need for the store or distribution past our own group. But alas Apple has the system pretty locked down, and we are trying to become "official" Apple developers. Perhaps I can now call Apple, or email them, and ask some specific, pointed, informed questions on the topic.

Thanks again guys. Anyone else that wants to slip in a word (without breaking their NDA), please do so. I can find little info on the web about how students are handling group dev projects under the current system.

~Tyler

 

[PhoneyDeveloper]

I suggest that you take it one step at a time. Becoming a registered developer is free. You should all do that and you can learn to write for the phone. When you think you need to download apps to your devices one of you can sign up and pay the fee and the rest can be 'beta testers' or whatever. You'll be able to provision multiple devices with one membership. It only becomes complicated if you want to deliver an app through the app store.

 

[Earendil]

I suggest that you take it one step at a time. Becoming a registered developer is free. You should all do that and you can learn to write for the phone. When you think you need to download apps to your devices one of you can sign up and pay the fee and the rest can be 'beta testers' or whatever. You'll be able to provision multiple devices with one membership. It only becomes complicated if you want to deliver an app through the app store.

We are all "registered and nonpaying" Apple developers, and all have the iPhone SDK at this point.

One official paid developer with the ability to provision multiple devices would be perfect, if they also have the ability to write, build, and load code onto those provisioned devices from more than one machine. If all written code as to be compiled and loaded from a single authorized machine, that makes the ability of spread out students without predictable or similar schedules to work together on any sort of united project.

Can one "provision" computers/XCode programs for compiling? Or is it just one machine + multiple devices?

 

[admanimal]

Can one "provision" computers/XCode programs for compiling? Or is it just one machine + multiple devices?

I don't think that any of the certificates or provisioning profiles are tied to a particular computer. I have used my one set of everything on three different computers at this point (all compiling for one device). All you do is use the keychain utility to export the certificates and then import them on the new machine you want to develop on (the instructions are on the developer site). I don't see any reason why this would not work on as many computers as you want.

 

[kingofmalkier]

I could be misreading the question about provisioning computers for compiling, because it is pretty early for me right now, but...

You don't actually need any provisioning just to compile and run the App in the iPhone simulator. It only becomes relevant when you want to test/run on the physical device. I wrote and tested my entire app on the simulator, only putting it on the device when I decided I was ready to go to market.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but just in case an assumption was being made I wanted to make sure I got that out there.

 

[Earendil]

I could be misreading the question about provisioning computers for compiling, because it is pretty early for me right now, but...

You don't actually need any provisioning just to compile and run the App in the iPhone simulator. It only becomes relevant when you want to test/run on the physical device. I wrote and tested my entire app on the simulator, only putting it on the device when I decided I was ready to go to market.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but just in case an assumption was being made I wanted to make sure I got that out there.

Yes, you are correct. Just to write and compile for the simulator, you only need the SDK and xCode, which are both free. But to load a piece of software that you wrote, onto an iPodTouch/iPhone, you need to implement some sort of certificate and verification "doohickies" (official term), that restrict what you can do. It's those restrictions and limitations that aren't well laid out by Apple, at least not laid out well in a place that is easy to find.

I really appreciate the help so far guys, really, I mean that

One of the issues with our development is that we are in this not for the money, or for writing simple applications, but for the use of alternative technologies like GPS, accelerometers, multi-touch interfaces. As juniors and Seniors in CS, we all know a thing or two, and have at least been around the block. But what we want to fiddle with and learn about are things the simulator won't satisfy. And as students, we REALLY need the motivation of implementation and hands on experience, not just code on a screen ;-)

It looks like it's worth it for us to at least try for the official program and see what we can manage.

Presumably none of the certificate stuff would get in the way of a source control system like SVN?

 

[kingofmalkier]

Presumably none of the certificate stuff would get in the way of a source control system like SVN?

Yeah, you should be fine. Xcode remembers what provisioning profile you're using in your user-specific project files and the certs are stored in your keychain.

 

[keiffer6]

Does this still hold true for 3.0 SDK and beta software? If you sign up as a Standard Individual are you able to install the SDK and 3.0 beta software on multiple devices for development? Or does the Standard Individual account only allow a single device?

 

[Taum]

You can definitely use several iPhone/iPod Touch (up to 100, to be exact). I did so myself.

I'm pretty sure you can also use the same development certificate on several Macs as long as you share the private key used for requesting the certificate, however I haven't actually tried to.