How to distribute an enterprise iOS app?

Question

It's an in-house iOS app for a small company. The company has iOS developer enterprise program. I am hoping that it is possible to distribute the app using their corporate website which has an SSL certificate ie without using an MDM server.

I am able to export an .ipa file for Enterprise Deployment. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can do it through their server in a few easy steps.

You need to first create an html page which the users can navigate to. This page will hold a button or link which will open a manifest plist with instructions to install the ipa file.

HTML:

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url="The url where the manifest.plist can be found"

This means that you not only need to generate a .ipa but also a .plist which will be the manifest. You can search how to generate manifest for iOS. One thing to keep in mind, the path to the .ipa referenced in the .plist will need to be its path on the server for example:

https://myserver.com/myapp/app.ipa

For this example we can assume that the myapp/ directory holds the .ipa, .plist and .html file for the app.

Assuming all provisioning profiles are set correctly, the user should then be able to download the app.