IPhone Developer Program - How to sell under multiple company names

8
votes

I work for a web agency and we have just been commissioned to produce an IPhone App for a client.

We would want to sell the App on the AppStore under the clients company name, not our own. When signing up our company to the IPhone Developer program, I see it says apps in the AppStore will appear under our company name.

Does this mean that we would have to sign up to the developer program once for each client we do an app for? Is there anyway we can have an account but distribute under multiple company names?

How do freelance IPhone Developers handle this?

Edit: I am specifically interested in how dev shops which produce IPhone apps to sell on behalf of their clients handle this.

3
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This is probably an oversight by Apple. They should allow for more flexibility, but I doubt they will. – Tim
Yeah I doubt it's enough to stop anyone developing for the iPhone, so you're right; they probably won't bother. – Robin Barnes

3 Answers

6
votes

Each client needs to sign up for the developer program.

If you don't have many clients, it's easiest to do Ad-Hoc builds from your own account and only do the final App Store build from theirs. Or, if they have technical people they can handle the ad-hoc builds themselves and not consume your precious device count on the developer portal.

You can be made a "admin" on a client portal, but the problem with using that is that only the person who created the company account can create and use Ad-Hoc certificates.

4
votes

You would sign up once. Your clients each would definitely want to sign up for their own account for the most important reason. That's where the bank information gets set to tell where the money goes. :). And contracts, sales data, etc. Assuming their $99 will be lost in the noise compared to your fees. :).

The best way for it to work is for you to do development under Wildcarded developer and distribution (ad hoc) code signing keys (your account). You can sign for multiple clients with the same keys set up that way. Then at the end, you sign and publish with a specific AppStore key (each client's account).

That will allow you to do control development, testing and even run a beta distribution program across clients. When development is over and you've settled on a master build, you hand over a Zip of the the release version signed with their key and they upload it via iTunes Connect under their account.

Bonus section: This configuration is easy to implement in XCode (once you get over the 24 hours of strangling yourself getting your head around xcode and the distribution certificates work. this is probably the most well documented iphone development problem. ask a real human who's done this before to set you up the first time. it'll be obvious from then on.)

Go to Project->Edit Project Settings->Configurations. Duplicate two new configurations off of the "Release" configuration. Call one "Ad Hoc", the other "AppStore". Set your signing certificates as follows, your iPhone Developer for Debug/Release, either iPhone Distribution for Ad Hoc, and their iPhone Distribution (AppStore) for "AppStore". Forget you even have a client until the end, then switch to AppStore distribution, build, zip, email, and done.

In practice, it's more complicated than that as you'll need to set up multiple certs/profiles/keys on your machine too, but once you're done, it basically runs like this.

2
votes

Not the answer you want, but I think yes, you'll need to sign up to the Developer Program once for each client.