How do I create a provisioning profile that allows developers on my team or clients to use early-stage builds of an unreleased app?

Question

Context: We're an app development agency that has recently enrolled in the (paid) Apple Developer Program as an organization.

Problem: We'd like to both

• a.) easily share WIP iOS projects with other team members so that they can test the software on their own iPhones or iPads
• b.) easily share WIP iOS projects with clients so they can give feedback on next steps.

Our current process is that we get the device UDIDs for every work device of every developer on our team and also for our clients. Once we have those UDIDs, we create a brand new provisioning profile and then compile (or "archive" in Xcode terminology) the WIP app using this profile.

But this has downsides:

• code that we've already compiled must be recompiled when the client sends us a new device (e.g. adding the iPhone UDID of a new project manager on their team)
• despite every developer on our own team being connected to our organization as a developer-class user in App Store Connect > Users, I don't know of any way to compile (/ "archive") an IPA such that anyone on my team can run it on their phone.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this pair of problems? Any pointers are highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Our org has an “enterprise” profile, used to archive a daily IPA which is published as a “Beta” build via a pipeline. Anybody in the org (without being devs) can just install the app, like you'd do from the App Store.

For hosting the app/build, you can use MS App Centre, which should solve your use case (and it also offers a free tier, to experiment and get a hang of it).