Question

We recently enrolled in the iOS Enterprise Developer Program to be able to use in-house distribution, which significantly simplifies the deployment of the apps inside our company which is fairly big. Before joining we have thoroughly read the program documentation and we were aware that the new account would live completely separated from the standard account we use for the AppStore submissions.

What I’m unsure about is now what would be the best way to organize the two accounts in the developer portals. I’m mostly concerned with the bundle identifier since I’ll be dealing with two different bundle ids inside Xcode for each application. All of our apps use iCloud and Push notifications so wildcard is not an option.

How do you organize this inside Xcode? Do you create two different targets or are you able to manage this with a new Project Configuration? What about iCloud entitlements?

EDIT

Just as an update I wanted to make clear that we’re looking for the best solution to build an app for both In-House distribution and for AppStore submission.

EDIT2

Given that the enterprise program does not grant you access to iTunesConnect, where test users and product ids can be setup, is there really no way to test InApp purchases?

Answer 1

I’m not entirely clear on what you need, but it sounds like you want to be able to build your app store apps for internal enterprise use. Is that correct?

If you want to be able to build your app with two different bundle IDs you can create a custom build setting, and give it different values for your different configurations.

So for example, you could create your Enterprise configuration:

Then go to your target’s build settings and add a user-defined build setting:

Give it a name like BUNDLE_ID, and if you expand the triangle you can give it different values for each configuration:

Next, open your Info.plist file and enter ${BUNDLE_ID} for the bundle id value:

When you compile using the “Enterprise” configuration, which you can do using a custom scheme (or via the command line build process if that’s what you use), the appropriate bundle id will be used.

You can also configure the code signing/provisiong profile setting in the same way:

Once you do this, the correct push notification/iCloud entitlements will be used depending on the configuration.

We’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time now. Our build server will generate enterprise and app store versions of our apps for each build, using exactly this technique.

When it comes to the provisioning portal, you will need to configure both app IDs separately for push notifications, iCloud, etc.

This does mean that push notifications must be sent separately to the app store and enterprise versions since they will not share the same bundle ID or push notification certificate.

The iCloud storage by default will be totally separate for the two versions. They may be able to access the same iCloud store (if you need this) as long as the entitlements are set up with the same team ID. But this may be a problem if you have two separate developer accounts.