Code Signing Your Apps & Development Certificate

So, you’ve done it. You’ve learned it all, conquered iPhone OS 3, and you’ve written your killer app. Now there’s just one more thing to learn: how to build an executable that can be uploaded to the App Store. In the early days of iPhone OS development, this step was perhaps the most frightening to developers. They often felt like it was such a complicated process and so difficult to get right that they would have to resort to voodoo to ensure that the development gods were smiling upon them. They would joke about sacrificing a chicken, or about surrounding their computers with circles of ash, to ward off the evil development spirits. All of this for what should be one of the simpler parts of developing iPhone applications: the process of code signing.

Thankfully, newer versions of the iPhone SDK have improved the code signing process significantly. It’s much easier and much simpler to understand today than it was then. In this chapter, I’m going to guide you through the process of getting a development certificate, installing it in Xcode, and then building your application for distribution. I’ll also go over how to set up an ad hoc build, which you can use to distribute executables to beta testers who do not have Xcode installed.

Acquiring a Development Certificate

Before you can even think about distributing your application, you need to acquire a development certificate from Apple. To do this, you first have to visit the iPhone developer portal at http:// developer.apple.com/iphone. Once there, you can follow their instructions for acquiring a development certificate. The development certificate consists of an electronic document that you digitally sign using an encryption key on your computer. You then generate a certificate-signing request for that document, and send the certificate-signing request to Apple for them to sign. Once they have signed it, you download the signed version and install it in Xcode.

The signed certificate, once installed in Xcode, is used to sign your applications. Only signed applications can be installed on an iPhone OS device. I will talk shortly about the provisioning process that determines how an application can be distributed, but for now, simply understand that all applications that are installed on iPhone OS devices must be signed. To generate your original certificate, you use the Keychain Access application in Mac OS X. Using it, you request a certificate from a certificate authority. Doing this generates a private key and a public key. Your private key is stored on your computer and should be backed up. If your private key is lost, you can no longer sign apps.

The iPhone portal has excellent step-by-step instructions for generating this certificate. I suggest that you read through the following few sections so that you gain a better understanding of how the provisioning process works, and then visit the iPhone portal and follow their instructions to generate your development certificate. Once you have your development certificate, you can return to this book and read how to install your development certificate in Xcode.

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