iOS App Development Portable Genius

Creating an Ad Hoc Build

You can distribute Ad Hoc builds as email attachments or web downloads. You can also use Over the Air distribution to give your testers the option to install your test build directly from a web download. The build process for both options is slightly different.

OTA distribution isn’t officially supported. It works in Xcode 4.3.1, but it’s really intended for corporate and enterprise developers. Don’t be surprised if this feature is withdrawn without notice.

Setting the Deployment Target

Whichever distribution option you choose, make sure you set a build setting called the Deployment Target before continuing.

Developers often have access to beta versions of iOS, and it’s likely you’ll build your app for the latest beta. Your testers are likely to have older public versions of iOS. So you must tell Xcode to build for an older version of an iOS. (Otherwise, your app won’t install on the tester’s device, and iOS will show a terse error message with no details about the problem.)

Figure 13.13 shows the Deployment Target menu in the Summary Build Settings. If you’re developing for a beta version of iOS, select the last public iOS version. Otherwise, select the current public version and warn your testers that they must upgrade to test your app.

Older devices ...