Getting your app onto your own device, or in the hands of potential testers, can be one of the most time-consuming challenges when developing an iOS app. To install an app on a single device, you must register the device with Apple and sign the app with the relevant provisioning profile. While this isn’t much of an issue for a single device, you need to register and re-sign the app each time you install the app on a new set of devices. For a developer, this repetitive action is a huge loss of time; for a tester, it’s a disruptive experience to receive an app and not be able to install it because your device hasn’t been provisioned, yet.

Today we’re excited to announce the release of auto-provisioning capabilities in App Center, enabling iOS developers to spend more time creating and shipping great apps, rather than managing device provisioning. With the new auto-provisioning capability, you no longer need to know the device IDs of testers, coworkers, or stakeholders when building a new beta version of your app for testing. We’ve integrated this capability directly into the install portal, so you can automate the distribution process and enable testers and team members to install your app with one click.

Setting Up Auto-Provisioning

All you need to get started with auto-provisioning is an ad-hoc provisioning profile and a production certificate, both of which are created in the Apple Developer portal, to produce a signed app ready for our distribution service.

Once you have an .ipa, select your app in App Center and navigate to the distribution service in the App Center portal to choose the distribution group you want to set up. Click on your distribution group settings and turn on Automatically manage devices. You’ll need your Apple ID credentials and your distribution certificate to complete this step.     Now that you’ve turned on the Automatically manage devices setting, next time you release a new version of your app using the App Center’s Build service or by manually uploading the app binary, App Center will automate the process for you and run the following steps without any action from you or your testers:

1. Log into your developer portal.
2. Register new device IDs.
3. Add them to the app’s provisioning profiles.
4. Download all updated profiles.
5. Re-sign the binary using the selected certificate and the updated profiles.
6. Enable all testers in the distribution group to install your app.

Every time you release a new version of your build, testers will get an email notification to install the app and start using it.

Get started today!

With auto-provisioning, App Center helps you streamline the release and distribution process and makes it easier for testers and team members to install and test your app. We encourage you to give it a spin so you can spend more time coding and less time managing devices!