I'm developing a sophisticated engineering calculation iPad app for a specific customer (much like the poster of this question). I'm getting ready to release a first version to them, and trying to get this distribution issue sorted out. There are pretty much 5 methods covered throughout that post (general App Store, B2B, Enterprise, Ad Hoc, and stuff requiring Jail Breaking), and most of the searching I've done has shown those same 5 options. I've been looking into TestFlight to manage the Ad Hoc distribution for beta testing right now, but down the road I'm going to need to allow my customer to mass install my app onto as many devices as desired (hopefully without needing to involve me at all by that point). So in the end, none of these 5 options are really attractive as a final solution.
A colleague found this App Doc that mentions something call packagemaker, which sounds like it's a Terminal tool, but I can't really find much on it (the Apple Doc simply says "create the package as you normally do", which is pretty much meaningless since I normally don't - and everything else I can find is from around 2009, and I've learned that anything described in those old posts is almost certainly wrong by this point when it comes to the Apple world). From what I can tell, packagemaker should let me build an installer executable that I can send to my customer, and they could just run that installer and it would put the app on their device. This is how we currently distribute similar software for Windows environment devices, and it would be ideal for what I'm trying to do.
Does anyone know if packagemaker can be used as I've described to install iOS apps? If so, can anyone point me toward a beginner-orientated tutorial on how to use it?
Packagemaker sounds like overkill. The old tuts should still work though, it hasn't changed much (or at all) since 10.5. It's a separate download from Apple Developer center.
You could use testflight, though I presume you want to install B2B apps, and not ad-hoc apps for testing.
In that case just create a bash script that builds and/or deploys your app to a connected device with xcodebuild and related tools. If you're concerned that your end user will find Terminal use appalling, write a tiny Cocoa app to support & run the script, and put the script and your iPad app into the bundle.
For example the app's User Interface could query the user for paths, the device, and whatever is necessary to deploy your app and pass it to the bash script which you can run easily with NSTask.
This is certainly going to be many times faster than getting into PackageMaker, and figuring out how it works - cause it really doesn't work in a straightforward way, unfortunately.
Related
For my master thesis I am working on reverse engineering a IPA file, since I'm new to this topic I'm open on all kind of suggestions. If anyone has any good tutorial or readings or just some personal knowledge to share with me, I would really appreciate it.
Long story short, I must:
RE the IPA: for this I'm focusing on two tools, IDA Pro (that isn't free) and Radare2 (open source).
Patch the RE app: I need to find specific safety checks (e.g. login, jailbreak, etc.), change the specific check in such a way that it returns the value I want.
Install the modified IPA on a jailbroken device to see that what I did worked :D
As I said, I am not expecting any ready-to-go solution for this question, instead I just would like to have some hints that could bring me on the right learning tracks.
Thanks a lot!!
Is it possible to create an API inside an iOS app to let 3rd party developers create app add-on that are downloadable for users inside the app?
I could not find any ressources for this topic online.
I think that's going to go against the app store guidelines if your intention is that the 3rd party developers write code, which will be downloaded and executed.
There's something of a grey area between legitimate uses and illegitimate uses of downloaded code:
Legitimate Example 1: Something like Hopscotch where children are creating simple fun shared games. These can be considered user generated content.
Legitimate Example 2: A game which is driven by scripts allows for the run-time downloading of patches to fix bugs in the scripts or even to add new levels. I believe such usages have been rejected occasionally in the past, but are generally accepted these days.
The relevant guideline from the guidelines is (emphasis mine):
2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code, including other iOS, watchOS, Mac OS X, or tvOS apps.
And the all-encompassing:
We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, "I'll know it when I see it". And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
If your idea is to create some sort of app-store within your app-store app, then I would abandon it immediately, because that's going to be way over Apple's line.
That said, you haven't given much detail about your app, so I might have made wrong assumptions about where you're thinking of going.
I have a multi-platform mobile app that I am releasing on iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, and Blackberry 10 (WebWorks). For the other three non-BB platforms, I have a way to distribute the enterprise app via a web server (user installs by clicking a link on a web page inside of a mobile browser). However, for BB10 Webworks, I can't seem to find a documented way to distribute a .bar file in this same manner.
Options:
1) I have seen docs that discuss placing Java-based apps (.jad and .cod files) on a web server for OTA distro, but can't find any documentation on being able to do the same with BB10 .bar files.
2) Blackberry App World - but this is public, which is not what I want for this enterprise app
3) Blackberry App World for Work and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 - both of these seem to be overkill for my modest purpose. I only have a single app and simply need a download link, not full app/device management, app catalogs, etc.
Is it possible to do #1 with .bars? Or is there another option I have not considered?
Thanks
I was not aware that sandboxed users could see apps other users couldn't, as mentioned in the one of the answer - something for me to try!
The only other option I am aware of is to "side load" the bar file, you can side load with various tools which you can find if you search, such as:
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-10-os-f269/how-get-bb10-hardware-id-sideload-app-bar-file-into-blackberry-10-a-780773/
http://forums.crackberry.com/android-app-sideloading-f279/how-sideload-apps-bb10-device-easy-way-windows-825656/
I haven't tried out these tools, sorry.
I actually do it using the tools you get with the Android Command line toolset - available from BB web site here:
http://developer.blackberry.com/android/tools/
but this approach are not 'user friendly'. I use it because I have converted a few Android apps to run on BB10 and so got to know the tools.
I can't say that these tools are safe, since I don't actually know them, but what I can say is that I am not aware of any way that a PC based tool sending something over the internet (or USB) to your BB10 could break it, nor am I aware of any way that a side loaded app could break your BB10. The days of bricking your BB devise with a dubious bit of software do seem (thankfully) to be over.
Edit: Just thought I would update this given the options that Nate has found, which I also didn't know about!
Both the sites Nate has found seem to work in the same way as the tools I mentioned above. My understanding of all these tools is that they run a deploy utility, that connects to the BB10 device via a TCP/IP connection (which could be routed over WiFi or USB), and sends the bar file over this connection. The connection is initiated by the deploy utility, which is why it has to be in the same network.
There is likely some BBRY proprietary protocol involved, which includes an exchange of the password, as the password supplied to the deploy utility must match the development password on the device.
Now I strongly suspect that BBRY have not published the specification for this communication. I also strongly suspect that the password is never seen in the clear, so you could not use some tool like Wireshark to reverse engineer this. My suspicions therefore is that the tools, including the two I have pointed you at, all run something like the Android Command line tool under the covers - and they got this from BBRY. So perhaps you can build something like the web sites yourself - assuming you have the time and inclination of course.
Just a thought and just my opinion.
There is probably a better way, but I don't know about it. Anyway: you can deploy an app to the BB World, but not put it up for sale, then add users accounts to your sandbox. They, and only them, will be able to download your application, which will not be shown on the BB World to anyone else.
This isn't natively supported on BlackBerry 10, but it looks like there are a few hacks that people have already figured out to make this work.
Depending on your needs, these may or may not work for you (see especially the security caveats on the FAQ pages).
https://sideswype.me/
https://barinstall.com
These appear to take advantage of a VPN security hole. BlackBerry has previously patched this hole, but according to the BarInstall site, the owner just added support for 10.2, to work around the patch.
Both of these services do charge a modest fee, but it may be easier for you than maintaining a BES server.
Peter Strange's answer is quite comprehensive for the time it was written. I will just add that with the release of BB 10.2 you have the option to distribute your application OTA as an APK. Since you are using HTML5 for development I suspect there will be little performance difference between running the APK and running the BAR. But that is something you can check out if you have, or know someone with a BB10 device. Performance should improve with the release of 10.3.
Are any squeak's etoys like apps available for download to the ipad?
Squeak running on iPad.
n.b. The Smalltalk mailing lists, accessible and searchable via http://forum.world.st/, are the first place to look for this type of question (the installation instructions below were the second hit for "iphone" there.
Bert ported eToys to the iPad, but as you can read here, it seems more like a proof of concept than something you would use every day.
IIRC, even though Apple changed course to allow other languages on the iPhone/iPad, you still can't download code, which means you will not find Bert's port in the app store (I think downloading projects, which are Smalltalk, is prohibited). If you want to install eToys or any other Squeak variant onto your personal iPhone, you can start here to find out how.
An Ocaml interpreter app was put up on iTunes last November. I've done some Haskell programming, and briefly looked into Ocaml at one time, but never really became acquainted with it. I have a new iPad, and am curious whether the Ocamlexample app available on iPad can actually be used for anything other than working through tutorial exercises.
I.e., does anyone know if it has the capability to save scripts (in its sandbox, of course), and any ability to export results (other than cut and paste)?
I can't find any references on Google much more current than last November, so it would appear that no one is actually doing anything with it.
Apple dropped many of their restrictions on iOS software development on September 9, 2010. Here is the press release announcing the changes:
Changes to development agreement Sept 9, 2010.
The only restriction now is that you can't download code. I.e., you can't have an embedded language implementation that is its own app platform.
This does limit the usefulness of an interpreter, but there is no rule against interpreters per se or against saving and reloading scripts in a particular iPad.
You can also compile OCaml to run on iOS. That's what I'm spending my time on right now, and I'm selling an OCaml iOS app in the iTunes Store. Visit my profile for a link.
(Hmm--I just noticed this was a pretty old question. Sorry for any extra noise.)
You can download scripts, but only if the mac/pc is tethered to the ipad and you use the dropbox function of ios. in theory this could be a program which opens a socket for your own protocol, however I have not tried this. It would have to be a single threaded protocol because Lwt is not implemented
From the way it's pitched, and knowing the App Store's rules, I don't think it's actually for making OCaml scripts. It just lets you do a limited set of calculations and drawing operations. Apple would reject it if they actually thought it was a programming language interpreter.