wireless iphone app distribution - problem with itms-services protocol

I had similar symptoms when I had a space in the filenames of the manifest file and the application archive file. I removed all spaces from them and the wireless install worked for me. It looks like your manifest doesn't have a space, so maybe your app file does?

The answer is actually very simple: The URL needs to be "double-escaped", i.e.

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=https://example.com/My%2520App.plist

This is because the value gets unescaped to https://example.com/My%20App.plist before being treated as another URL. This gets unescaped by the server at example.com to a space.

The parser does not treat + specially: ...&url=https://.../test/a+b results in "GET /test/a+b HTTP/1.1" appearing in the Apache logs. (It is unwise to assume that all query strings are application/x-www-form-urlencoded; this is only standardized in HTML.)

Incidentally, it looks like itms-services uses +[NSURL URLWithString:] to validate URLs: url=.../My%20App.plist results in no request because [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://.../My App.plist"] returns nil. However, there's a long-standing bug in NSURL: It will escape a single invalid (BMP) character at the end instead of returning nil. My test cases

• url=.../test/%3c results in the log "GET /test/< HTTP/1.1" (this is definitely invalid HTTP!)
• url=.../test/%0a results in an error on device but no log message (because Apache treats it as a malformed request)
• url=.../test/%0d results in the log "GET /test/\r HTTP/1.1"

itms-services is an identifier by which apple/iphone will identify that it should validate the certificate and it should install.

To validate the provisioning profile before installing the ipa file it will connect to "ax.init.itunes.apple.com" and "ocsp.apple.com".

If you are using any intranet connection please check whether these links are accessible or not? if not, you cannot install the application via over the air.

& minimum OS on the device should be 4.0