One of the things we have been doing over the last few days has been another iPhone application.

A common problem during development is getting it onto our clients phones for testing before it goes up onto the app store. This is because Apple makes it exceedingly difficult to deploy onto devices unless you physically have the device to hand (and even then its a pain!).

This time, we had the opportunity to give jailbreaking a go, as a very good friend of mine (and guru behind the app in question), got away from his desk and went and bought us a couple of iPhones to muck around with. Basically he needed a quick and easy way of getting the development version of the app onto various devices without having to go through the rigmarole of setting up xcode for code signing and device provisioning for each and every different iPhone whilst we are developing or putting onto our clients iPhone’s so they can test.

So we simply provided a step-by-step guide to jailbreaking the iPhone and detailing how to get the development build of the app onto the device.
Granted, its still a slight pain, but at least no hanging around for Apple to send out code signing keys and deploying via xcode.

Another great benefit is the ease for us as a development team to easily get the build of an app onto the devices. We just build it then scp it onto the device. No need to setup xcode on each and every Mac we use to do builds.

So for any development companies out there who are developing for the iPhone, its well worth having a device that’s jailbroken simply for developing with.