Applying for the iOS Developer Program

I’ve been reading many blogs and books about beginning iPhone and iPad development lately. I’ve found a plethora of information on the subject. There are many good blogs and forums where people exchange information on their experience as they got started in the App Store. Many of these resources that I’ve looked at lately suggest that you begin the process of applying for official membership in Apple’s iOS Developer Program. This process can be lengthy, especially for a business. There are a couple of different levels of membership in the developer programs at Apple. And there are a couple of different programs. There is an iOS Develper Program, Mac Developer Program, and Safari Developer Program. My main interest is the iOS program, and within that program there are 3 different membership “levels”. Well, 4 if you count the free version. Here is the basic breakdown between the 4 (these aren’t official names of the levels of membership, just descriptions according to what I can remember about them):

• Free - download released iOS SDK, Xcode and develop/test using iOS Simulator
• Paid Individual ($99) - same as free with access to pre-release SDK and software, test on your device, submit applications to the App Store.
• Paid Organization ($99) - same as individual plus ability to add a team of developers to the same account. You can set up teams and administrators of teams, but there is only one Agent who does all the submitting of apps to the App Store and agreeing to terms and contracts, etc. You can set up 100 devices for testing each year of your membership.
• Enterprise ($299) - same as organization except you can also develop and deploy production applications for internal use in your organization.

I opted to go for the Paid Organization level of membership. This process was a little more extensive than the individual process, but it will allow for growth in the future. Right now, I’m the only iOS developer for CloudApp IT, LLC. However, that can easily change in the future. I applied for the program about 2 weeks ago online. There was a little bit of basic demographic info that I submitted. Then a few days later, Apple requested that I fax over some legal documents for my organization. I faxed our Articles and played the waiting game again. A couple days later, Apple let me know that they had received my documents and were reviewing them. My enrollment remained in this state for about 5 days. Then, this morning, I got a call from a nice lady at Apple informing me that my documents looked good an I was approved. I logged on to the member center at developer.apple.com, purchased the program, waited about an hour for a confirmation email after my purchase, and I was in. Lots of posts on blogs that I’ve read have indicated that the process of getting started with all the code signing certificates, etc. could be complicated. I found that developer.apple.com had some really nice and easy to follow how-to videos. I just watched those videos for about 15 minutes and then boom, my first app was up and running on my actual iPhone device! I’m pretty excited to get started with posting my app on the store. I’ll keep you posted on my experience in the process of posting apps to the store. Look for the next post to be about more experiences as I learn to use the iOS SDK to get my first app together. Until then, reach for the clouds!