How do large iOS development companies manage their Apple Developer accounts? [closed]

Answer 1

Creating multiple accounts to get around the device limit is a violation of the Developer agreement:

(I was going to quote the developer agreement here, but after 30 minutes of searching, I can not find the agreement on the dev site or itunesconnect, but I remember it had a clause in there about not creating multiple accounts)

Update: You can petition Apple to increase your device limit.

There are different types of developer accounts. The enterprise account has a higher device limit, but I'm not sure what that limit is. I think it is 500. With an enterprise account you can also setup a pseudo-appstore for internal distribution. http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/enterprise/

Answer 2

Although this is an old question might add my two cents worth after going through this at my organisation.

We have two accounts, enterprise and standard for distribution through the iOS store, each account has max 100 (not sure if this was different earlier but thats our current limit). Most developers are added to the enterprise account.

Unless you have a massive amount of developers and I doubt any would if they think about it only developers should have their devices on the account. Once it needs to go to clients or shared not for public use we use ad-hoc distribution which doesn't count towards your device id's.

We also petitioned Apple for more devices and we got an additional 10 which didn't really solve the problem.

With regards to the private key, you should never distribute it. It's a major security vulnerability.

Answer 3

The limit for enterprise accounts is also 100 devices and creating multiple accounts to overcome the limit is against apple's TOS. So the best way to go is to give a developer account (this is for testing) for each developer in the company and make releases through a specific centralized developer account.

Answer 4

Yes, it is okay to create multiple developer accounts. What we do is that each developer has an Apple developer account and generates their own development certificate. In the main corporate account (the team agent account), we create development and distribution provisioning profiles used by everyone. Apple has a clear and helpful guide on setting up a multi-developer team.

Each dev's certificate is added to the development profile; this means that every dev can use this development profile to run the app on their phones. Xcode will by default pick up their development certificate associated with this profile (if the code signing identity in project settings is set to "Automatic Profile Selector" > "iPhone Developer").

Unfortunately for the distribution profile though, you cannot really add any other certificate except the distribution certificate you created from your corporate account. A simple workaround to this is to just share the complete distribution certificate (public+private key and cert) with any developers that should have the ability to create a distribution build for the app (for a small team like ours, we just share the distribution cert with everyone). You can easily export this certificate from Keychain Access.

Once the dev(s) have added this distribution certificate to their keychain, this too will automagically be selected by Xcode during a distribution build (provided the code signing identity for the relevant build configuration is set to "iPhone Distribution").

Apart from this, I am not really aware of how you can get past the 100 device limitation, since all the devices have to be added to one account (the corporate/team agent account).