Multiple Teams

Question

Multiple Teams

Hi there, this might be asked several times but here we go:

we are a company that neither facilates own iOS development knowledge nor hardware. If we have multiple external app development companies:

Following this link https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1763/_index.html we would need to have an admin from each company create an distribution certificate and thereby revoking the other companies distribution certificate leaving their respective provisioning profiles useless. Is that the intended way? Wouldn't it be smarter to have the option to create multiple teams with one developer program account and hence have one distribution cert for each team? AFAIK this is not possible by now. Is this information correct?
Is there any other (smart) way to handle this situation except giving the private keys to the distribution certificate to the developement companies? Remember, we don't have Mac infrastructure so having the companies sending us archives to distribute is not (yet) an option.

Thanks and kind regards

Jens

Posted on Sep 19, 2012 8:18 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

K T

Level 7

23,865 points

Sep 19, 2012 8:29 AM in response to Jens Schwendemann

1.) Each account has a unique ID. Each ID has a team of one or more members (only an LLC/company can have a team with more than one member). Each member has a role.

A person can be a member of multiple teams.

2.) A Mac is required to properly build and submit apps under your example.

It's not clear what it is you're looking to do, tho, sorry. It sounds like you have someone outside your company contracted to build apps that you can't submit to the store. That means one account/ID and one set of credentials...yours.

Your account credentials must be used to upload - if that means sharing that info with someone outside of your company, you may want to clearly outline what that means in your current contracts/agreements with those other parties.

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Answer 2

Sep 19, 2012 10:05 AM in response to K T

Ok, we already are enrolled in the iOS Developer Program and able to register multiple persons as members or even admins. However, it seems that what apple referes to as "team" (http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/General/Conceptual/Applica tionDevelopmentOverview/CreateYourDevelopmentTeam/CreateYourDevelopmentTeam.html) is a 1:1 relationship to a developer account (account ID).

Maybe I wasn't clear enough about our situation: We are a company that has multiple apps already uploaded to the app store on our behalf. A few apps (say app "A1" and "A2") were developed by comany "C1". As they were the first company we hired to do app development (and we didn't have the knowledge what they would need and time was short (usual situations)) they got credentials to the developer portal and set things up as they would own the developer account. So they had the private keys to the distribution certificate for instance.

Now we have another company "C2" to develop another app "A3". This company now would either need the private keys to the distribution certificate or would need access rights as admin to the developer portal to revoke the former distribution certifikate and issue a new one, leading to unusable provisioning profiles for company "C1".

Given the situation, is my understanding of the situation outlined in the above paragraph correct?
Giving the above, it would be neat / great, if a single developer account would be able to have multiple teams. So the developer from company "C1" could have his own distribution certificate and developer from company "C2" could have a separate one yielding in 2 distribution certificates that still point to our very own organisation. Wouldn't that make sense?
Granted we would circumvent many pains having Mac infrastructure. But as you might imagine the networks and security guys at a bigger corp are not very happy supporting (yet) another OS in their infrastructure and hence we are stuck in the situation without any Mac hardare.

Hope this helps to clarify. Really appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks so far for the input given.

Kind regards

Jens

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Answer 3

K T

Level 7

23,865 points

Sep 19, 2012 10:48 AM in response to Jens Schwendemann

Boil it down further, pls., thanks.

You do or don't have your own account?

Keep it simple 🙂

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Answer 4

Sep 20, 2012 12:00 AM in response to K T

I do have my own account. Actually its my companies account. The other companies I was refering (company C1 and company C2) are just developer studios that created apps for us.

C1 was the first dev studio we hired. They pretty much set up our own account as they had (don't have anymore) credentials to the agents role of our account. Hence they had access to the private keys of the distribution certificate. I know, this was not a smart move, but things already had happened when I got into place.

C2 was the second dev studio we hired. They now have the problem (according to them) that they would either need to revoke the existing distribution certificate or get hands on the private keys that dev studio C1 originally created. Both solutions are suboptimal in my opinion, or am I getting picky on this?

Kind regards

Jens

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