Thursday, June 25, 2009

How to Remove a Provisioning Profile from iTunes on Windows XP

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 Windows XP machine, as well as how to remove it from the phone.

Step 1

Ensure that your iPhone is not connected to your PC (you’ll connect and sync later).

If iTunes is running, close it.

Step 2
Delete the provisioning profile from your PC
  1. Navigate to: C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileDevice\ Note that Application Data may be a hidden folder.
  2. Delete the provisioning profile
Step 3

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

10 comments:

  1. Awesome! Exactly what I needed!

    ReplyDelete
  2. how do you do this in windows vista and mac

    ReplyDelete
  3. On a Mac you should navigate to folder "Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles" and remove items from there. Or remove the whole folder.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I created a similar post with instructions for how to do this on a Mac. Go here http://mobilestrategist.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-remove-provisioning-profile-from.html if interested

    ReplyDelete
  5. How about on windows vista?

    ReplyDelete
  6. ok so ... why is there no profile tab on my iphone4?

    ReplyDelete
  7. On Windows 7 this is located here:

    C:\Users\(User Account Name)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileDevice\Provisioning Profiles


    Where (User Account Name) is your Windows Username.

    HTH,
    ajuonline

    ReplyDelete

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