Recently, my company got a fancy new ios enterprise account which allows you to distribute apps over the air to anyone in your organization. This is how you do it:
- When you are finished and ready to distribute you app, in xcode go to: Product –> Archive
- Your Organizer will appear with several options. Click “Distribute…”
- Select “Save for Enterprise or Ad Hoc Deployment”
- Select Your provisioning profile and click “Export”
- When you have the option to save the file, check the box that says “Save for Enterprise Distribution”
- Enter the url where the file will live. For instance “http://mysite.com/app/myapp.ipa”
- Organizer will export two files. a .ipa file (which is your app) and a .plist file (which is needed to install the app) Upload these to your server in the same spot you entered the above URL. These two files should live in the same directory.
- Now you need to upload your mobile provisioning file in the same directory. You can download your .mobileprovision file from the apple developer portal.
- Once that’s uploaded send an email to the person who is to install the app with the following format:
http://mysite.com/app/myapp.mobileprovision itms-services:///?action=download-manifest&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com%2Fapp%2Fmyapp.plist
The user needs to download the mobileprovision file first. They will be asked to install it. Then they can click the other link to install the app on their phone.
Boom, done.
NOTE: if you update some devices and wish to refresh your ios team provisioning profile, you need to go into xcode to refresh it. The profiles won’t automatically refresh if you simply add devices on the developer portal. You need to also do this.