ios - How does TestFlight do it?

Question

TestFlight offers over-the-air beta distribution of iOS apps (on non-jailbroken devices). How can this be done? Is this an iOS feature, or a vulnerability exploit?

Answer 1

This article showed how Apples OTA implementation works and can be used outside enterprises as well: ios wireless app distribution

The complete process is documented by Apple. Apple also published documentation and sample code for registering devices and get the UDID by using profiles, so your website can detect which device is calling.

Some additional solutions with different strenghts:

• iOS Beta Builder, a Mac Application to create the website by using a build. Simply upload the resulting files to your webserver.

• Diawi: Simple Web service. Upload your IPA file, optionally set a password and send a link to your testers.

• AppSendr: Web service for beta build hosting, similar to Testflight, but does not include the device registration process. But provides deployment utilities to automatically upload new versions.

• HockeyKit: Open source project for hosting beta versions on your own PHP5 server with additional functionalities like an client for In-App-Updates, automatic device specific web sites and handling multiple applications. Completely file and directory based.

• HockeyApp: Web Service for beta build hosting, In-App-Updates, Statistics, and including device registration, invite and recruitment. Also provides server side crash report collection, symbolication (for all threads) and crash grouping for beta and app store apps (iOS + Mac). SDKs are open source, using HockeyKit, QuincyKit and PLCrashReporter (which is the only safe solution on how to do crash report collection on iOS, see this article.

Note: I am the main developer of HockeyKit and QuincyKit, and one of the developers of HockeyApp.