It looks like Apple’s Developer Center is getting a visual refresh as the developer center account page has been updated today with some notable changes. The main view after signing in has gone through a reorganization, making accessing various sections much easier. Moving primary links into a left sidebar view, developer’s can now quickly access their CloudKit Dashboard, Documentation, and even the Bug Reporter.
This morning, Apple updated its Apple Web Server notifications page to credit security researcher Ibrahim Balic and several others for pointing out security flaws in their web servers.
Balic claimed to be responsible for taking down the Developer Center after demonstrating how security flaws in the website allowed him to gather full names and Apple IDs. After Apple did not respond promptly to his bug reports, he posted the details to YouTube and discussed them on Twitter. The video has since been taken down.
During the Developer Center’s one week outage (other services took even longer to be restored), Balic was contacted by Apple and their security team to gather more details. During initial contact with 9to5Mac back in July, he was very persistent on stating that he’s not a “hacker” and was not going to use the data for any malicious purposes. Apple, it appears, did appreciate his findings and is now crediting him on their website:
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This account already had 81 devices.
Apple’s Developer Center is now allowing certain developers to add up to 200 iOS devices to their account, double the previous amount allowed. Devices registered in this list can beta test a developer’s applications as well as the unreleased versions of iOS (and related software like iTunes).
Developers have been wanting the limit to increase for quite some time, since removing a device does not increase the count again until membership is renewed:
How many iOS devices can I register for testing and Ad Hoc distribution?
You are allowed to register up to 100 iOS devices for testing and Ad Hoc distribution per membership year.Please Note: Although you may remove a device from your account, it will continue to count against your 100 device limit.
As seen above, Apple’s documentation still reflects the 100 device limit and there has not been a new post in the developer center news, so the new limit may be a fluke or something that is rolling out to specific developers only.
(Thanks, Mr. Cool Guy!)
Apple has added some additional information to the Developer Portal’s maintenance page stating that memberships that were supposed to expire during the unexpectedly-long downtime have been extended to accommodate for the issue and apps will remain on the store until the portal is available again and developers can properly renew their accounts:
