Finding provision profile for app?

Question

I recently inherited the management duties of an internal software application that our company uses. I worked as a developer on the team for 2 years before this, so I'm pretty familiar with the app/code. One section of the app offers various downloads to help people do their jobs (pdfs, maps, mobile apps, etc). We don't build or manage these downloads, we just aggregate them and make them available in one place. One of those mobile apps appears to have an expired provision profile that needs to be updated.

My team and I have zero experience developing for iOS or knowledge of how it's done, so I don't know how to update this provisioning profile myself. In my efforts to track down who in the company owns this app (as far as I know, it's also an internally developed app), I'm turning up nothing. NO ONE appears to know anything about this app.

One of the developers in the company told me that if I can locate the .provisionprofile file, it would likely contain the name of whoever published it. I've done everything I know how to do, though, and I haven't been able to track that file down anywhere.

Any suggestions about how to figure out who owns this app? Is it possible to extract the .provisionprofile from the ipa? Any creative suggestions for any of this would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Yes, if you have the .ipa, you can get the mobile provision profile.

First, unzip the .ipa by right clicking and selecting "open with Archive Utility". (Even though it has the extension .ipa, it is really just a .zip file archive.)

That you give you a folder, containing another folder named "Payload". Open that folder and find a file with the extension ".app". Right click on this file and select "Show Package Contents".

Finally, within that list of file, you should see one named "embedded.mobileprovision". That's the file you need. Open it in a text editor and you should see the developer or organization that created the app.