Monday, March 7, 2011

Creating an iPhone Ad Hoc Distribution

There's always some step here that I forget, so here's my checklist of things to do in order to get a working distribution build for your iOS project:
  1. Make sure you have Default.png and Icon.png added to project
  2. go to developer.apple.com, create App ID (this is the "bundle ID")
  3. go to developer.apple.com, create distribution provisioning profile
  4. download distribution profile
  5. drag profile from Finder into XCode Organizer's "Profiles" window. This is critical.
  6. optional: add profile to the project. Sometimes this helps.
  7. optional: quit xcode & restart. Sometimes this helps.
  8. app target info, properties tab: edit Identifier to match App ID
  9. target info, build tab, configurations popup: choose "Edit Configurations..."
  10. duplicate Release config, rename "MyApp adhoc"
  11. build settings for adhoc, Code Signing: choose the adhoc profile
  12. build settings, "Packaging" section: edit "Product Name" to be what you want
  13. choose Adhoc / Device as your build target
  14. build
And you're done!

To distribute this app, you'll have to mail both the app (MyApp/build/MyApp adhoc-iphoneos/MyApp.app) and the provisioning profile to your users. If they have macs, they can use the iPhone Configuration Utility to install onto their device. Windows people need special zips (.IPA?) which you can find detailed elsewhere.