Not announcing the Kinetic Battery Charger app

I had hoped to announce the release of my latest iPhone application on the App Store, sadly that's not happening here.

Lately I've been experimenting with the built in accelerator and wanted to put the code to use in an actual app, so I decided to make an app which simulates charging the phone battery when you shake it. Like you would shake your kinetic wristwatch to keep it running.

I designed a battery graphic and added a bar that grows when the phone is shaken to simulate charging. I thought it turned out really well, and the people I've shown it to have said it's hilarious even though they weren't fooled for long.

I submitted the application as a freebie to the Entertainment category on the App Store, but it turns out Apple's reviewer didn't find it entertaining. Instead I received a letter stating that it wouldn't be allowed on the store.

Unfortunately, your application, Kinetic Battery Charger, cannot be added to the App Store because it uses standard iPhone screen images in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of standard iPhone graphics, actions, and images, or simulating failures of those graphics, actions, or images is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program agreement which requires applications to abide by the Human Interface Guidelines.

Now this is obviously a form letter as I am not using any standard iPhone screen images at all, except for the info-button which works as expected by revealing a settings screen. I sent a reply stating this fact but have not heard back.

I also spent a few hours pouring through the Human Interface Guidelines in search for anything explaining why my application would not be acceptable but came up empty handed.

I find it a little frustrating that the feedback you get from the App Store reviewers doesn't contain any actual information about what they are objecting to. How hard can it be to take a screenshot of the application and draw a circle to point out the offending piece?

Oh well, back to updating the apps I already have on the store, that will hopefully be time better spent.

CodeSign error: a valid provisioning profile is required for product type 'Application' in SDK 'Device - iPhone OS 2.0'

Lately I've been working on adding some improvements to my Hiragana iPhone application, which I expect to submit to the App Store any day now.

This post, however, is not about amazing new features. Instead it's about a problem I ran into when compiling for Ad Hoc Distribution. Instead of the expected Succeeded message Xcode gave me the error message CodeSign error: a valid provisioning profile is required for product type 'Application' in SDK 'Device - iPhone OS 2.0'.

None of the classic tricks of restarting Xcode and cleaning the build had any effect. After banging my head against the screen for a while (that iMac screen is surprisingly sturdy) I was finally able to figure out that my project file wasn't set up to use the provisioning file I had installed on the system.

 

Since last compiling the application I have added a few new devices to my Ad Hoc provisioning profile. This appears to have surprised Xcode somewhat since it did not update the project file with the new provisioning identifier.

Here are the steps that worked for me, perhaps they'll come in handy for someone else as well:

1. Go to ~/Library/MobileDevices/Provisioning Profiles and open your Ad Hoc provisioning file in a texteditor, I used Smultron.

2. Find the section that looks like this

<key>UUID</key>

<string>xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx</string>

3. Copy the identifier string.

4. Go to you project directory and make a backup copy of your MyProject.xcodeproj file.

5. In the Finder right click and select Show Package Contents on your MyProject.xcodeproj file.

6. Open the project.pbxproj file with your text editor. 

7. Find all rows containing "PROVISIONING_PROFILE[sdk=iphoneos*]" = "xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"; that appear in an Ad Hoc section.

8. Replace the assigned value with the provisioning file's identifier, which you copied earlier.

9. Save and launch Xcode to try to build.

This worked for me. I hope it works for you if you run into the same problem.