iOS Enterprise In House Distribution Process

Question

We currently have an Enterprise account with a Distribution Certificate installed with a Distribution Provisioning profile (which contains a wildcard app ID for all of our apps). They are installed on our machines correctly, and each target points to the correct profile. We've been trying to get applications to install correctly, but it only likes devices that have been included in the registered device list in our provisioning portal. These devices happened to be included through Xcode. I understand that with an enterprise license, the requirements of having the device in the portal via UDID is not necessary, and it should allow for distribution to devices within the company. We have about 10 targets with different bundle identifier suffixes, but conform with our distribution wildcard profile. We have included an entitlements.plist file that has the following key/values:

get-task-allow: NO
application-identifier: $(AppIdentifierPrefix)$(CFBundleIdentifier)
keychain-access-groups:
  Item 0: $(AppIdentifierPrefix)$(CFBundleIdentifier)

Everything compiles correctly and code-signing works, but trying to distribute the app through the air to other devices returns a 'Unable to Download' error. We run CI and we have a script that compiles and code-signs everything, and then generates a webpage with all the apps so users can test them out. The distribution provisioning profile is set to 'In House' and is signed with the certificate we're using.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Figured it out. Seems like everything was set correctly, we just had an old, lingering distribution profile that was used in our script. That profile would embed with the apps and hence wouldn't work.

Answer 2

We have just configured a setup very similar to what you are describing. We wanted to use a wildcard provisioning profile for OTA distribution of several apps with different app ids, without the need to specify device UUID's in the provisioning profile.

While we quickly got it working for an iPad app, I spent to great a part of my life, wondering why I couldn't make it work for an iPhone build. I was faced with the same annoying "Unable to download" error, and no clue of any kind in the device logs as to what might be wrong.

It turned out, that the problem was with my .plist file, which contained a wrong reference to a 512px icon. A 512px icon which isn't even used, but having a non-existing URL in the .plist was enough to break the whole OTA installation process. I simply ended up removing the "full-size-image" section from my .plist, and now it works like a charm!