provisioning profile - Over The Air (OTA) iOS IPA File Distribution For Public?

Question

I saw this Chinese company offering a demo for their app/service which is a .ipa file. You can simply visit a link by your iPhone via Safari and you can install the demo .ipa file.

The link is right under the iphone app download button.

This makes me wonder what stops people from distributing their app this way outside the Apple app store. A legal issue, but technical can-do?

And I am also wondering what the provisioning profile they have used is, to generate this .ipa file from Xcode with such broad capacity of installation. As far as Ad Hoc distribution profile goes, it allows only 100 users, still correct?　Is this some other provisioning profile I don't know about? My best guess is that this is a normal enterprice installation and they just make it for everyone in the world... can they?

I have tried the demo on my iPhone 4 and it works fine. The left button on the login page is register. The right button is login. Try register with a name (make name unique) and password, as long as you can get a success message back. You can log in.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26042508/over-the-air-ota-ios-ipa-file-distribution-for-public

Answer 1

I work in a company that releases on a private store too, and it works in a very similar way. The only difference is, Apple does not check the app and it takes 1 minute to upload it, not 2 weeks.

How it works :

1. Generate the ipa for entreprise distribution (with the correct provisioning profiles)
2. Upload the ipa wherever you want, if you need something beautiful, you could make an app that lists your IPA (your own private store) with information about it, and a link to download it (look below)
3. Upload the .plist file and make it so the url in the url field is the .ipa that you uploaded on step 1.
4. Create a basic HTML page with this line where you want it :

5. Users can now click it and download ;)

   <a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=YOUR-UPLOADED-PLIST-FILE.plist">Click here ;-)</a>
   

Note that you're not allowed to publish apps publicly like this. This is meant, for example, to distribute apps within your own company. More specifically and as an example, we had 4 apps. The store, a timesheeting app, a contact/adress book, and other specific apps that don't need to be explained. But it would be against the EULA of Apple to share any of those apps (or download links) publicly. Trying to publishing on the Apple app store would also not pass the review.

That being said, this is very practical and useful for many companies in a lot of cases, because you're free to not follow any guideline, and avoid the stressful review.

Any other questions :) ?