Iphone – Difficulties with iPhone ad-hoc distribution for testing

adhocdistributioniphone

I'm attempting to do an ad-hoc distribution of my (first) iPhone App to a small group of volunteer testers. I've looked through Apple's documentation, as well as a number of blog posts, but am still having trouble. I have a couple questions about things that aren't clear (to me, at least):

When creating Development and/or Distribution certificate requests, for Common Name, should I use my name or my company's name? I registered for the iPhone Developer program as a company, and the portal shows this company name, but also my own name as "Agent".

Also, Apple's documentation (the "Publishing Applications for Testing" chapter of the Developer's Guide) contains a diagram showing the Tester Provisioning Profile as containing info about the Tester Device, the Test App ID, and the Development Certificate. When I try to create the Tester (Ad-hoc) Provisioning Profile on the portal, it selects the Distribution Certificate, not the Development Certificate. Is this right? It seems to make sense, but doesn't match the diagram.

Any other advice on ad-hoc provisioning would also be appreciated, particularly how to gather information for troubleshooting. My testers have reported getting an "application was not installed because an unknown error occurred (0xE8008016)" message, which doesn't tell me anything about what I may have done wrong.

Thanks,
Andrew

Best Answer

Well, I seem to have it working -- sorry for the long delay in following up. Here's the best resource on this that I've found: http://www.bigspaceship.com/blog/labs/iphone-101-understanding-distribution-pt-i-of-ii/ although even it doesn't get quite all the details right, and it seem that Apple changes the iPhone Program portal often, so maybe no resource will ever be fully up-to-date. Your mileage may vary.

To answer the questions I posed (and reply to some of the questions raised in other answers): For the Developer Certificate, I used my own name. For the distribution certificate, I used the name of the Company. Yes, the dist.plist bust exist and the get-task-allow property is false.

Finally, one more gotcha: the AppID/Bundle identifier should be all-lowercase.