is it possible to use the same app ID for multiple applications?

Question

I was wondering if it's possible to use the same app ID for multiple iOS applications. Apologize if this is a really simple question, but I just could not find it anywhere.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Short answer: No.

Long answer: You can create a wildcard app ID which might be what you're thinking of so that you've just got one provisioning profile for a suite of apps. See the Apple docs on it.

Answer 2

pretty sure they're unique.. that's how the OS uniquely identifies your app no matter what your bundle is named etc.

From the documentation:

CFBundleIdentifier

CFBundleIdentifier (String - iOS, Mac OS X) uniquely identifies the bundle. Each distinct application or bundle on the system must have a unique bundle ID. The system uses this string to identify your application in many ways. For example, the preferences system uses this string to identify the application for which a given preference applies; Launch Services uses the bundle identifier to locate an application capable of opening a particular file, using the first application it finds with the given identifier; in iOS, the bundle identifier is used in validating the application’s signature.

The bundle ID string must be a uniform type identifier (UTI) that contains only alphanumeric (A-Z,a-z,0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. The string should also be in reverse-DNS format. For example, if your company’s domain is Ajax.com and you create an application named Hello, you could assign the string com.Ajax.Hello as your application’s bundle identifier.