Signing With a Free Personal Team

The 7-day provisioning profile, blocked capabilities, and the upgrade path to the paid Apple Developer Program

Apple lets anyone with a free Apple ID build and install apps on their own physical devices. This page is about the constraints of that path and when you need to upgrade to the paid Apple Developer Program (USD 99 / year).

The Free Personal Team

When you sign in to Xcode with a regular Apple ID (not a paid Apple Developer Program account), Xcode gives you a free “Personal Team”. It shows up in Xcode > Settings > Accounts as Your Name (Personal Team).

What the Personal Team can do:

• Run your app on the iOS Simulator as much as you want
• Install your app on your own physical iPhones and iPads
• Use most Tauri plugins and system APIs that don’t require special entitlements

What it explicitly cannot do:

• Submit to the App Store or TestFlight
• Use capabilities that require entitlements (push notifications, iCloud, App Groups, Sign in with Apple, associated domains, Apple Pay, Background Modes limited set)
• Distribute builds to anyone who isn’t on your Apple ID

The 7-Day Provisioning Profile

This is the headline limitation. A Personal Team provisioning profile expires 7 days after it was created. When the profile expires, the app on your device just stops launching — tapping the icon does nothing or shows a vague error.

To keep the app working, you have to rebuild and redeploy from Xcode (or cargo tauri ios dev) which refreshes the profile for another 7 days.

Other Quota Limits

Hit any of these and the workaround is to either delete old App IDs from the Apple Developer portal or upgrade to the paid program.

Configuring Tauri for a Personal Team

Find your Team ID in Xcode:

1. Xcode > Settings > Accounts
2. Select your Apple ID
3. Click Manage Certificates or the team row — the 10-character Team ID is visible near your team name

Set it in tauri.conf.json:

{
  "bundle": {
    "iOS": {
      "developmentTeam": "ABCD123456"
    }
  }
}

Or via environment variable if you don’t want to commit it:

export APPLE_DEVELOPMENT_TEAM=ABCD123456
cargo tauri ios dev --host

Xcode will automatically generate and refresh the provisioning profile the first time you build.

Bundle Identifier Quirks

With a free Personal Team, the bundle identifier (tauri.conf.json > identifier) must be globally unique to your Apple ID. Two gotchas to keep in mind:

Collisions With Yourself

If you install com.takazudo.myapp as dev build 1, then change the code and try to reinstall as com.takazudo.myapp dev build 2, iOS usually handles this. But if you use the same identifier on multiple machines signed into the same Apple ID, the device can get confused about which provisioning profile to trust.

Solution: keep a machine-specific prefix or suffix during experimentation, e.g. com.takazudo.myapp.dev.

Hyphens and Underscores

As noted in the project structure, older Tauri versions had bugs with - or _ in the identifier. Stick to alphanumeric + dots until proven otherwise. com.takazudo.myappdev is safer than com.takazudo.my-app-dev.

Trusting the Developer on the Device

The first time you install a free-team-signed build on a physical iPhone:

1. Tap the installed app — iOS refuses to launch it, showing “Untrusted Developer”
2. On the iPhone: Settings > General > VPN & Device Management
3. Find your developer entry (your Apple ID email)
4. Tap Trust "Apple Development: your@email.com" > Trust
5. Re-launch the app

This trust persists per developer per device, so you only do it once per Apple ID per iPhone. But if you wipe the device or sign into iCloud differently, you’ll redo it.

What’s Blocked and What to Do About It

If you try to enable a blocked capability in the entitlements file, the build fails at sign time with Provisioning profile "..." doesn't include the <Capability> entitlement.

Upgrade Path to the Paid Program

When you’re ready to distribute beyond your own devices:

1. Enroll at developer.apple.com/programs — USD 99 / year, Apple verifies your identity (can take days for individuals, weeks for organizations needing a D-U-N-S number)
2. Once approved, your Apple ID gains access to a real team (not “Personal Team”)
3. Update tauri.conf.json > bundle > iOS > developmentTeam with the new Team ID
4. In the Apple Developer portal, register the bundle identifier as an App ID
5. For App Store submission, follow Tauri’s App Store guide
6. Provisioning profiles now last 1 year instead of 7 days
7. TestFlight becomes available for external beta testers

Nothing in your Tauri code changes on upgrade; only the config and the Xcode team selection.

CI Signing (Paid Program Only)

Once you have a paid team, CI signing is done via App Store Connect API keys and environment variables:

For manual signing (rarer with Tauri since Xcode automatic signing is usually enough), additional env vars carry base64-encoded certificate and provisioning profile data:

• IOS_CERTIFICATE
• IOS_CERTIFICATE_PASSWORD
• IOS_MOBILE_PROVISION

See Tauri’s iOS Code Signing docs for the full procedure.

Common Pitfalls

App launches once then never again

The provisioning profile expired. Redeploy from cargo tauri ios dev or Xcode to refresh for another 7 days.

No profiles for 'com.takazudo.myapp' were found

Xcode couldn’t generate a free-team profile. Usually because:

• You’re not signed into Xcode (Xcode > Settings > Accounts)
• You hit the 10-App-ID limit (delete old ones from developer.apple.com/account/resources/identifiers)
• You tried to use a capability the free team doesn’t allow — remove it from the entitlements file

”Provisioning profile doesn’t include the Push Notifications capability”

You left the push entitlement in the entitlements file but the free team can’t sign for push. Remove aps-environment from gen/apple/<AppName>_iOS/<AppName>_iOS.entitlements.

App works on simulator but fails on device

The simulator doesn’t enforce signing. Almost any code runs. The device does enforce signing, so this is where missing capabilities, expired profiles, and team mismatches surface.

Official Docs

• Tauri iOS Code Signing
• Apple: Compare Memberships
• Apple: Provisioning Profile Updates