Provisioning an iOS Application


Apple requires you to provision your applications and iOS devices to be able to run your applications on those devices, to distribute your application ad hoc, or to submit your application to the App Store.

Prerequisites

Before you can provision your application you must:

Creating an App ID for Your Application

Apple requires you to create an App ID for each one of your applications, or for a group of applications. The App ID is a unique identifier for your applications. See the Apple documentation to learn how to create an app ID for your new application.

You must update the value of the CFBundleIdentifier field of the Version Info page of your project for iOS platforms so that it contains the App ID of your application, to do this:

  1. Go to Project > Options > Version Info
  2. Update the CFBundleIdentifier field to include the Bundle ID such as for example:
com.mycompany.$(ModuleName)

To be able to add iOS In-App Purchase support to your application, use an explicit app ID that is specific to a single application; for example: com.mycompany.myapp. You cannot use a wildcard app ID such as com.mycompany.*. That is to say, myapp name should coincide with the App ID name of the itunesconnect entry of your application.

Creating and Installing Your Provisioning Profiles

Apple requires you to create a provisioning profile for each App ID, which you can use to provision your applications that use that App ID. For each App ID, you may require the following provisioning profiles:

  • A development provisioning profile, necessary to sign applications for debug, so that you can run your application on your iOS devices (Development platform configuration)
  • A distribution provisioning profile to sign applications for ad hoc distribution of your application (Ad hoc platform configuration)
  • A distribution provisioning profile to sign applications for submission to the App Store (Application Store platform configuration)

See the Apple documentation to learn how to create these provisioning profiles and how to install them on your iOS devices.

From RAD Studio XE8, the selected provisioning profile is automatically installed on the target device. You only need to select the device on the Project Manager and deploy the project.

Configuring Your Provisioning Profiles on RAD Studio

With your application open in RAD Studio, select Project > Options > Provisioning. Here you must provide your provisioning data for the different iOS device platform configurations: Development, Ad hoc, and Application Store.

Note: Platform configurations for the iOS Device - 32 bit and iOS Device - 64 bit target platforms are not shared. For example, your changes to iOS Device - 32 bit - Development do not affect iOS Device - 64 bit - Development; if you want to change the Development iOS platform configuration you must change both iOS Device - 32 bit - Development and iOS Device - 64 bit - Development.

When you configure your provisioning data for the Development platform configuration, select in Target the build configuration that you want to use to debug your application (for example, Debug).
When you configure your provisioning data for the Ad hoc and Application Store platform configurations, select in Target the build configuration that you want to use to deploy your application (for example, Release).

Note: You can configure your default provisioning profiles from Tools > Options > Environment Options > Provisioning. If you do not configure your provisioning profiles for your new project, RAD Studio uses the default provisioning profiles instead.

See Also