Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 7
Distributing Enterprise iOS
Applications
If you're distributing apps for sale to end users, the process is fairly straightforward.
You sign up for an iOS developer account, create a development provisioning profile,
build your app and test it on devices set up for debugging, create a distribution provi-
sioning profile, build and archive your app, and upload it to the store.
This model works well for consumer products developed by an individual or small
group, but there are other ways to do things that will assist you when developing ap-
plications in the enterprise.
Testing Applications with Ad Hoc Profiles
In a large organization, a lot of people may want to get their hands on your application
before launch. Obviously, there's your QA group, but also people from sales and mar-
keting, internationalization, performance testing, and beta customers. Having them all
come over to your desk to hook their devices up to your Mac and deploy the app with
XCode can quickly become a nightmare. Toward the end of our 2.0 release, we had
over 40 devices being used internally for testing.
The way to get around this is by using an Ad Hoc profile. An Ad Hoc signed app contains
the UDID of every device that is allowed to run the application. Once a UDID is in-
cluded in the app, you can send them the packaged IPA file, and they can drag it right
into iTunes and install it to the device. Better yet, as you will see, we can automate the
process so that they can directly download it from the build server.
The first step is to add all the devices into the iOS Provisioning Portal (
Figure 7-1
). This
can be a fairly painful process, as UDIDs are pretty long. The easiest way to do this is
to have your testers fire up iTunes, select their docked device, click on the Serial Num-
ber field (which will toggle it to displaying the UDID), and hit copy (Command or Alt-
C, depending on the OS), shown in
Figure 7-2
.
