Distribute your iPhone/iPad adhoc builds Over The Air using Dropbox
Update: I recently found this site called diawi.com which allows you to distribute the app similar to file-sharing sites, drag and drop ipa file and share the link to the testers.
Yes, there is an awesome service by Testflight App which I highly recommend. Not because I received their stickers for being an early adaptor :). It does so many things which makes distributing app for beta testing a breeze, go try it yourself.
I was just curious to know how OTA works, after testing with own web server for internal testing, I thought why can’t I do this with Dropbox?
- Build your app from xcode using Build and Archive option.
- Upload your ipa file to Dropbox. And get public link for the ipa.
- Download the manifest.plist file from https://gist.github.com/1051160 and edit the line #14 with the public link of your ipa. Modify other keys as well (bundle-identifier, bundle-version, title)
- Upload the modified manifest.plist to Dropbox and get its public link.
- Download index.html from https://gist.github.com/1051163 and edit url param at line #8 with public link of your manifest.plist
- Upload the index.html to Dropbox and share the public link of it with your beta testers.
Upload your ipa
Copying public link
All files, copying public url for index.html
Installing the app
App icon will be disappeared once the installation complete (which is weird), but restarting the device does solve the issue. You have your app on springboard for testing. Enjoy delivering your adhoc builds to your testers by distributing over the air.
NO iTunes FTW.