over the Air Test version app for Apple

Nov 28, 2016 2 min read

Apple App Distribution

Distributing an iPhone application is a headache. We(our iOs Team) use a service called Diawi to deploy Development and In-house applications directly to the devices. We must need to add allowed devices already to those provisioning profile and these files with ipa to diawi.

Problem

Diawi provides a link with an expiry time and we need to share provisioning profile and certificates with them too. Everytime they produce a new link.

Solution

generate an IPA via xcode/CLI
get the link of the IPA and add in the plist
place generated plist file in drop box
get the link from the dropbox
construct an items link with the dropbox

You can send the items link to the testing team to use the file for testing. This setting up is an one time process and for further changes and the updates you just replace the IPA file is the already uploaded path. The testing team in the remote can fetch the updated file with the same link path.

A sample items link is given below.

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=https://myWebsite/myApp/myApp.plist

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=<Dropbox URL>

Note:

We haven't implemented this yet to our iOS Team app distibution process, We got this excellent
idea from the reference given below, By this way, for sure we'll solve the issue of testing of
iOS apps with the team in a remote location.