iOS Development Nightmares

If I had to choose between using the Apple Developer Portal and going to the dentist, I’m going to the dentist. At least I know what pain to expect there. Here are some tips that I wish I had gotten before I had done any iOS development.

Developer vs Enterprise Account
The Enterprise account does not include the benefits of the Developer account, despite costing $200 more. And you need to set up two separate Apple IDs (email accounts) to have both. It’s buried in their program enrollment support page.

Push Notifications
You need two different certificates for this, dev and production, both of which need to be added the to the application in the portal. Then you’ll create a provisioning profile for development, ad-hoc, and app store. Ad-hoc will be used to test push notifications through the production server before the app hits the app store. You can only test push notification on a physical device.

If you use Azure Notification Hubs, never let a device with a development provisioning profile connect to the hub with the production push cert on it. The hub will be eternally ruined at that point, and you’ll have to recreate it. It will not give you any error messages about this, it will instead just stop working for no apparent reason.

Beta Testing
This should be done through TestFlight or another service. The IPA through iTunes method is a crapshoot at best.

iTunes Image Assets
These seem to only be used for the IPA through iTunes beta testing deployment, so don’t even do them.

Apple Developer Portal
It’s not just you, it really is an unusable disaster. Whoever built it should have been a dentist.