Since the pre-release of our first business application Partae, we’d been manually installing the beta software onto our tester’s devices the old fashioned way; adding their device ID to our development provisioning profile and installing with cable.
After having the opportunity to beta test for another independent developer for their game Dead Panic we found there was an easier way to get your software onto your tester’s devices. The easier way is of course supplying a .ipa file and your .mobileprovision file to add to iTunes.
We successfully did this many times leading up to the release of Deal or Not which proved to work well, however it came with a couple of drawbacks.
- Missing logo file in iTunes
- Cumbersome
- Time consuming
- Prone to error
Instead, we focussed our efforts on putting a simple (yet effective) build script together that would do remedy the above mentioned issues. Since to develop for an iPhone you need a Macintosh, you’ll also have ant already installed.
Here’s our ant script which builds in 1 second, and has you ready to provide to your testers in no time at all.
Simply:
- place these files into the root dir of your XCode project
- Change the build.properties file
- issue the command “ant build” or just “ant” to get usage explanation
AntScriptv1-0.zip