Showing posts with label Distribution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Distribution. Show all posts

Thursday, July 10, 2014

iOS Enterprise App Distribution

We have been going through the steps for building an app for iOS Enterprise distribution.  To make it
a little harder, the apps were being built in Xamarin.  However, the steps below works for Xcode too.  We finally conquered all the challenges -- and it wasn't super easy.  Here are a few items to remember for next time:

  • As of iOS 7.1, you must deploy your ipa file to an SSL cert site.
  • You must setup a distribution Provisioning Profile (from an Enterprise subscription).  Once you generate one, download it locally, then right click and "Install".  I had to restart Xcode for it to be recognized.

    With Xamarin, there was only one gotcha: After importing the Provisioning Profile, we had to go to the Project and right-click => Options.  Then go to "iOS Bundle Signing".  From there, we had to make sure the correct Identity was selected and the correct Provisioning Profile.  This was not auto-selected correctly.
  • Additionally, we had to go to iOS IPA Options and check the Build ad-hoc/enterprise package. No other options were filled on that screen.

  • When deployed to the website, when we clicked on the download link, we started receiving the error message:
Unable to Download Application
"Your Application" could not be downloaded at this time.
To fix this, we discovered that the URL that is built into the plist file has to be the full path to the ipa file, such as:

<dict>
<key>kind</key>
<string>software-package</string>
<key>url</key>
<string>https://domain.com/fullpath/AppName.ipa</string>
</dict>


  • Finally, we had to set the mime type correctly.  We were using IIS, so:  Open IIS Manager, right-click on Server(local computer), select "MIME Types" => New.  Then add the following:


.IPA   - application/octet-stream 
.PLIST -  text/plain.

Once all that was corrected, we clicked on the link and auto-magically everything lit up and worked.  It's not super easy, but really flows nicely when it works correctly.