Question

Please excuse my Apple and iOS dev noobness. 🙂

I’m trying to figure out exactly what a company and each developer needs to do from a licensing and Apple account perspective under the following scenario:

A company wants to do some iOS dev work, mostly just prototyping and basically getting familiar with iOS dev for now. The company dev team is mostly Windows / Java so we don’t yet have any Mac hardware or Apple licenses.

Here’s some details:

• This is a real company so we’ll be able to provide Apple with whatever they need as part of the identity verification process.
• If we move beyond prototyping, the app would eventually be delivered through the app store.
• The developers (maybe 5 people max for now) will use time in between projects to get hands on and up to speed. Therefore we’re considering getting maybe one or two Macs to be shared amongst the group for now. If we get serious later then each developer can get a dedicated machine.

I know the company needs to register for iOS Developer Program.

But what about each developer? Does each developer doing work for the company need their own Apple account and/or license?

Edit for clarity: I’m simply trying to understand what I need to do to comply with licenses in the scenario described above. Certainly not looking to get away on the cheap or bypass anything.

Answer 1

Each employee needs their own Apple Developer Account (which is free), but to get stuff onto the App Store, the company will need a company Apple Developer Account (which you can get from here).

The company account will have a “team agent”, which is in charge of administrating the company account and inviting “team members” (the other developers who are doing development for you and can build debug & testing versions of your apps). But ultimately it is the team agent who is in charge of building a version that goes up onto the store.

And like Ramhound said, if you only have one or two Macintoshes to share amongst the group, then there’s no sense having everyone sign up for Apple Developer Accounts. You probably can set up both of those Macintoshes with your “team agent” (or master) signing keys so both Macintoshes can build & post test and store versions of the app (this probably also depends on the legalese in Apple’s licensing agreement… it may be that any developer doing work for you still needs to sign up for his/her own free Apple Developer Account).