How to detect that a provisioning profile is for development or distribution, programmatically

Question

I would like to detect if a given provisioning profile is a development profile or a distribution (adhoc or app store) profile. I need to do this purely programmatically.

Answer 1

Based on Bryan Musial great answer I wrote some code that allow you to check "get-task-allow" directly from application at runtime. In my case I'm using this boolean to only log in debug apps :

+ (BOOL)isDevelopmentApp
{
    // Special case of simulator
    if (isSimulator)
    {
        return YES;
    }

    // There is no provisioning profile in AppStore Apps
    NSString *profilePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"embedded" ofType:@"mobileprovision"];

    // Check provisioning profile existence
    if (profilePath)
    {
        // Get hex representation
        NSData *profileData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:profilePath];
        NSString *profileString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", profileData];

        // Remove brackets at beginning and end
        profileString = [profileString stringByReplacingCharactersInRange:NSMakeRange(0, 1) withString:@""];
        profileString = [profileString stringByReplacingCharactersInRange:NSMakeRange(profileString.length - 1, 1) withString:@""];

        // Remove spaces
        profileString = [profileString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];

        // Convert hex values to readable characters
        NSMutableString *profileText = [NSMutableString new];
        for (int i = 0; i < profileString.length; i += 2)
        {
            NSString *hexChar = [profileString substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(i, 2)];
            int value = 0;
            sscanf([hexChar cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding], "%x", &value);
            [profileText appendFormat:@"%c", (char)value];
        }

        // Remove whitespaces and new lines characters
        NSArray *profileWords = [profileText componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];
        NSString *profileClearText = [profileWords componentsJoinedByString:@""];

        // Look for debug value
        NSRange debugRange = [profileClearText rangeOfString:@"get-task-allow"];
        if (debugRange.location != NSNotFound)
        {
            return YES;
        }
    }

    // Return NO by default to avoid security leaks
    return NO;
}