How to Remove a Provisioning Profile from iTunes on Mac OS X

If you are developing and testing applications for the iPhone, you may occasionally need to remove an old or obsolete provisioning profile from iPhones in a test or pilot environment. While this is straightforward, the problem is that the profile is reinstalled on the iPhone the next time your users sync with iTunes. The way to work around this problem is to remove the provisioning profile from iTunes as well. While this is not difficult, there is no obvious way to do this from iTunes. Therefore, I thought I’d post some instructions on how to do just this. Here I’ll describe how to remove a provisioning profile from iTunes on a Mac, as well as how to remove it from the phone.

Step 1

Ensure that your iPhone is not connected to your Mac (you’ll connect and sync later). If iTunes is running, close it.

Step 2

1. Delete the provisioning profile from your Mac
2. Open Finder
3. Navigate to <your_home_directory>/Library/MobileDevice/ProvisioningProfiles
4. Select the provisioning profile(s) you wish to remove, right click, select Move to Trash

Step 3

1. Remove the provisioning profile from your iPhone
2. Go to Settings -> General we
3. Scroll down to Profiles
4. Tap the profile you wish to remove
5. Tap the red Remove button, a confirmation dialog will appear
6. Tap Remove to dismiss the dialog and remove the provisioning profile
7. You will be returned to Settings -> General

There. You’re done and the profile is gone.