how to make a ipa for my game,so let user to test it

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by adot777, Nov 6, 2009.

  1. adot777

    adot777 Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2009
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    i dont know how to make the ipa file my game "GeoGeo Wars",so come here ask for help.

    i make the "ipa" file in order to let user help me test the new features before my game submitted to appstore...
    :):):)
     
  2. Bronson15

    Bronson15 Well-Known Member

    Sep 21, 2009
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    Change the .app file to a .ipa file.
     
  3. adot777

    adot777 Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2009
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    Have you test it ? i try it one minute ago, cant work for me~~~:confused::confused:
     
  4. Firestar

    Firestar Well-Known Member

    Apr 4, 2009
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    Student/Programer
    Wellington, New Zealand
    You don't. First, create a distribution provisioning profile in the Developer Portal. Use that profile to codesign your app. Then you send them a copy of your provisioning profile, along with the .app file. They need to drag and drop both of these into iTunes.
     
  5. Basically a .ipa file is just a ZIP file that contains a Payload folder with your .app in it, and a file at the root level called iTunesArtwork (with no extension). The iTunesArtwork file is a 512x512 version of your app's icon.

    The .ipa file makes it easier to send apps to Windows users in particular, since otherwise the .app appears to them as a normal folder, which confuses some people.

    This page has a good description of a process for automating the creation of the .ipa file in XCode.
     
  6. adot777

    adot777 Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2009
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    good stuff..thanks a lot
     
  7. adot777

    adot777 Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2009
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    when i syn the app, itunes prompt messagebox say:"not a valid appliation"
     
  8. GlennX

    GlennX Well-Known Member

    May 10, 2009
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    #8 GlennX, Nov 8, 2009
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2009
    It's cool that it can be automated but that is a lot of extra instructions!

    I picked up this tip from the official dev forums a few months ago:

    If you are a dev with a working ad-hoc build consisting of a provisioning profile and a .app "file" (which is of course really a folder and causing problems for some users) all you need to do to turn it into a .ipa file is this:

    Drag the .app "file" onto your iTunes icon.

    <YourApp>.ipa will appear where iTunes stores it's apps, on my mac it's "MyMac/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications"

    These two files are all your users need to simply drag into iTunes on their machine.

    A word of warning though. I distributed my game to testers as a provsion and a .app file rather than zipping them thinking it would save a stage and simplify everything.

    It actually caused more problems than it solved! It turned out that most users (or rather the way their browser was set up) were trying to 'open' rather than 'download' the files. This works OK on some machines but not all.

    It's far safer to zip up a folder with the two files. This is because the default behavior for opening a .zip file from the browser is to dump a folder with the files in on the desktop. This is true for both Windows and OSX.
     
  9. Here's a good article that covers making an ipa file and a few other 'gotchas'. Very useful.
     

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