IOS Enterprise Distribution Through OTA

As of December 2011, these are the steps:

1. Create a provisioning profile in your Apple Enterprise account
2. Set this as the Code Signing Identity under the Build setting of your app.
3. Make sure the Bundle ID matches that of the provisioning profile.
4. Select Product > Archive to build IPA file.
5. Click Share (aka Distribute) button after selecting your Archive.
6. Set Contents radio button to iOS App Store Package (.ipa)
7. Make sure Identity in dropdown is the one used from Enterprise account.
8. Click Next
9. Select the check box "Save for Enterprise Distribution"
10. For Application URL put in the URL that points to where the ipa file will be placed (example: http://oursite.com/myApp.ipa)
11. Click Save. This will save a plist & an ipa file for you.
12. Place these files on your server with a link formated like this:
    <a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http:/oursite.com/myApp.plist" id="text">
13. Go to this page from your device and click the link to install the app

Probably the best way to distribute your enterprise mobile app and then securely manage users, groups, data and devices is using a Mobile Device Manager (MDM) tool suite.

iOS provides specific APIs that support enterprise deployment via MDM products with API level features like Per App VPN connections that allow you to firewall a DMZ application server to only connect to a specific signed client iOS app. The vendors also provided authentication SSO integration and encrypted storage on the devices to sandbox your enterprise apps from other untrusted personal apps on a BYOD device.

Here's the Gartner 2013 review of MDM products:

• http://www.business.att.com/content/whitepaper/Gartner-MDM-MQ.pdf

The 3 major players are now: Air Watch, Mobile Iron and Citrix XenMobile.

NOTE: I don't work for or have a vested interest in any MDM vendor.

There are two solutions

1. Try testflightapp.com

   It does everything for you. It even has a SDK which I found very useful in debugging scenarios with logs and crash reports.

2. If you are looking to have your own hosted solution for the enterprise then http://hockeykit.net/ is the best bet.

   It has a client application which makes the upgrade process painless. It also have a server side code which you can deploy on your server.

   https://github.com/TheRealKerni/HockeyKit

3. Update 2013-11-23:

   We have been using Diawi happily for quite some time.