iPhone App Distribution .

There are some tools to support over-the-air distribution of iOS apps but we use none of these. We created a custom solution because its so easy. Here is what you need:

- Net connection for your tablets/iphones (wifi)
- Setup an HTTP server (we use apache) that is reachable by your devices and setup a folder in which you will place your installable apps. Make sure that your HTTP server will server .ipa files with "application/octet" mime type, and .plist files with "text/xml" mime type. Don't use https (just pure http without authentication) because it wont work, at least it didn't work for us when we tested but since then they might have fixed that issue.
- You need to place 3 files into the http folder for each app you wanna install on your devices: a .ipa file, a .plist file (manifest), and a .png image that will be displayed as the icon of the app while the app is being downloaded and installed. The .plist file is a special xml file that contains some info about the app and contains two links: one to the .ipa file, and one to the .png file.
- Place a pure webpage somewhere (maybe an index.html) on your http server and create a specal link to the .plist file like:

<a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://myserver.com/app.plist">click to install</a>

Link to the apple site about this:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/FA_Wireless_Enterprise_App_Distribution/Introduction/Introduction.html[^]
On this site choose the language then expand the tree on the left side and you will find a sample manifest (.plist) file at the bottom of the tree. Download it and modify it to match the info of your app. You can comment out/delete the parts that are marked with "optional" comment (like md5 check). Use valid links to the .ipa and .png files in it and a correct budnle-identifier otherwise it wont work!!!!

Our build system automatically uploads apps to our server (scp) and instead of a static .html file we use a python cgi script that parses the directories and generates a webpage that contains those special links to all .plist files so the users can download anything from the browser of tablets/iphones.