Apple's new Developer Portal
So, Apple changed the developer portal over this weekend and we must say, we were impressed when we saw the new interface on Monday. But the happiness was short lived to say the least.
Soon we realized, that while the new UI looks great, a lot of issues have been introduced in the developer portal, some rather serious.
- First, its way too slow. You'll see the loading icon for quite some time before you can get to work
- Next, if you work on multiple apps or beta testers and use the developer portal regularly, you would know the need for editing ad hoc provisioning profiles regularly - adding device UDIDs, removing them. But now, for every change you need to make to the device list associated with an ad hoc provisioning file, you will need to RECREATE the profile, that's right - delete the old profile, create a new one. There's no way you can see which device UDIDs are included in a provisioning profile
- There have also been reports of certificates not working either. If you create a new certificate and try to use it in a new provisioning profile, the profile says a valid certificate is unavailable
We've come to expect Apple's products/releases to be high quality, thanks to the amazing products they have released in the past. But with Apple maps, wi-fi issues and now this, it seems to be happening too many times with Apple now. Looks like they are concentrating on just getting features out and not testing them through for the quality they were known for.
We just hope Apple's gets their act together and takes these issues up. It's not going to help them make developers' lives difficult. The simplicity of developing for iOS is what attracted developers to the iOS platform and made it so big. Apple, lets just keep it that way!
Update - 10 April 2013
Apple has fixed the numerous issues in the developer portal and you can now add/remove devices from provisioning profiles without recreating them. The slow loading is still an issue. Lets hope they get to it soon.