Call on 6th Feb:
Present: @ajinasokan @fossdot
Agenda: Possibility of helping multiple developers with single Apple developer account.
MoM:
- We can create an account as organization. We can add multiple owners to manage overall account.
- We can add individual developers with permissions to work on specific apps.
- A person with a normal free Apple iCloud account can build and run the source code in their own phone (which is logged in with same account). This doesn’t need a paid developer account. But apps installed this way will get expired after 7 days. This can be extended with AltStore. Initial work for the app can be done this way.
- If a developer want to install an app in someone else’s phone(with physical access) then developer’s account has to be added to the paid organization account. Can be done this way. I’m not sure if there is any limit to the number of accounts that can be added like this. But there is a limit to number of 3rd party devices - 100. Certificates for this are called Provisional certificates.
- If a developer wants to publish an app to app store they need a Distribution certificate. There is a limit of 3 per account. So we can’t give one for every developer. And it won’t be safe as well as it has permission over all the apps.
- In theory we could set up a CI with the account credentials and distribution certificate and attach it to the repository of the app. There are Github actions available. I think the app repo has to be under the organization to handle the credentials properly.
- We can try and experiment with this flow and I can help to set it up.