Gotcha of the Day: XCode Refuses To Refresh Provisioning Profiles

Today I needed to add a device to one of the provisioning profiles I'm using for iOS Development. How hard could this be, right?

I headed over to developer.apple.com and added the device to my provisioning profile. Being especially clever, I decided tp change the name of the profile to reassure myself I was using the latest one. I then shut down XCode, opened it up again, and went through the refresh process:

1. Menu: XCode » Preferences
2. Accounts Tab
3. Clicked on my Apple ID
4. Clicked on my company name
5. Clicked on View Details
6. Clicked the little refresh icon

And....nothing. My newly renamed profile wasn't there.

I then tried everything in the book I could think of to get XCode to pull this bad boy in. I renamed the profile back to what it was called before. I restarted XCode multiple times. I rebooted. I was done.

My guess is that there's some sort of time delay between when profiles are changed on the website and they are available for download. But, that's just a guess. All I know is that I wanted to move on with my life and get this app built with the right profile.

I read somewhere that profiles are found on disk at: ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles, so I decided to go all brute force on this problem.

I manually downloaded the updated provisioning profile to disk. Then moved all the files out of the above directory and put this newly downloaded one in it.

To my great surprise, when I opened up XCode it detected the new certificate. Apparently it didn't mind me going around its back.

Personally, I'm happier working with files on disk than crossing my fingers and hoping that the synchronization logic they have in place for profiles is going to work. Still, after my latest Apple development discovery, I'm in too good a mood to complain about them.