As you may already know, a non-jailbroken iOS device is only able to run apps approved by Apple and installed through the App Store.
Apple achieves this by requiring that every app run by iOS has a signed Apple Certificate. Apps installed from the App Store come bundled with a certificate, which the system verifies before it allows the app to run. If there’s no signature or if the signature is invalid, the app won’t run.
As a developer, you need to be able to run your apps on your own devices on a regular basis as you’re developing them. In order to do this, you need a way to create and sign your own certificates.
That’s where the Certificates, IDs & Profiles area comes in. This section allows you to generate what Apple calls “profiles”. Profiles, sometimes called “code signing identities,” are files generated by the Developer Center that allow Xcode to sign your apps in a way that allows iOS on your devices to identify them as valid.
The Certificates, IDs & Profiles area can also generate push certificates in case your app wants to send push notifications.
You can create Profile manually or let Xcode generate it automatically for you, you will need to create a profile manually and upload this profile file into our iOS app builder with some other additional files needed to get Eduopus iOS app ready.
There are two types of profiles:
Development profiles. These are tied to specific devices, so the app can only run on those.
Distribution profiles. These are used to sign your app before you submit it to Apple for approval. Although they contain no device-specific information, you can’t use them to install apps on any device yourself because Apple still has to sign the app after the approval process.