I recently got a Macbook to develop an application for our company to show off at the industrial automation fair this year. I’ll probably post about the project later, if I can manage to build it.

Since I have no intention to put any application on App Store, and I don’t want to wait for the approval process, I decided to deploy my application on a jailbroke iPhone. Here’s how:

  1. Visit blackra1n.com and jailbreak your iPhone.
  2. Follow these instructions carefully. (backup)
  3. Above instructions does not mention that you have to select the certificate you have just created explicitly in Xcode. You can do it by selecting your project in “Groups & Files” pane, then hitting Command + I. This will pop up Get Info window for the project. In the Build tab, Code Signing category select the certificate you have just created.
  4. Now you can get the infamous “No provisioned iPhone OS device is connected.” error as I did. With the inspiration from this article (backup), in Xcode I did Window -> Organizer and selected my iPhone and clicked Use for development.
  5. Now I’m able to deploy my apps to the jailbroke iPhone.

Final words… I must say, in contrast to this, programming a Windows Mobile device is as easy as plugging the device to your computer and clicking debug button.

Even though Apple’s intention to strictly supervise the applications going into App Store is a good choice (because you don’t have crap-ware that cripples your device as you’d see in Windows platforms), restricting one from programming his own device is plain stupid.

NOTE: Above method is a pain in the ass and it does not support build-and-go/debug feature of Xcode — though there are documentation that explains how to do it. I end-up buying a subscription for $99, the whole process took 16h, and I had to fax a signed document to Apple. So if you are in a region that you can do subscription online, you’d be done in much shorter time.

Conclusion: Buy a subscription :)