Install iOS application( ipa file) inside another app? - ios

Question

I try to write an app, it can download an application from web server ( ipa file) and install it. Does anyone know how to install this ipa file ? Can i do it using OTA inside app or use command line to install it ?

Answer 1

So here's an instant solution for jailbroken devices, which makes it possible to directly install any .ipa file from within your application. The steps you have to take is:
I. Gain root access. You can achieve this by calling setuid(0); from your main() function. You'll need to set the sticky permission bit on your executable and use a startup script too.
II. Unzip the .ipa file. Yes, that's right - IPAs are just disguised ZIP files. You can use the opensource libzip library for this.
III. There'll be a directory called Payload inside. The actual app bundle (let's call it MyApp.app) will reside in that folder.
IV. Create a directory in the /var/mobile/Applications directory on the filesystem. This will be the container sandbox of the app to be installed. By convention, the name of this directory should be an UUID. For example, you can use the following code snippet for this:
CFUUIDRef uuidObj = CFUUIDCreate(NULL);
CFStringRef uuid = CFUUIDCreateString(NULL, uuidObj);
CFRelease(uuidObj);
NSString *appPath = [#"/var/mobile/Applications" stringByAppendingPathComponent:(id)uuid];
[fmgr createDirectoryAtPath:appPath withIntermediateDirectories:YES attributes:nil error:NULL];
CFRelease(uuid);
V. Find the app bundle by looping through the contents of the Payload directory (obtained in step II). Copy it over to the newly created sandbox (of which the name is the UUID string). Also copy the iTunesMetadata.plist and iTunesArtwork files in order iTunes to display a nice icon for the app and to notify you of updates. Fix the permissions of the executable of the application as well to make it executable:
NSString *execName = [appInfoPlist objectForKey:#"CFBundleExecutable"];
NSString *execPath = [bundle stringByAppendingPathComponent:execName];
chmod(execPath.UTF8String, 0755);
VI. You'll need to tell SpringBoard to locate your app and then to reload its installed app cache to make the icon of the freshly installed appear on the home screen. For this, you first update the list of the applications in the MobileInstallation property list file. Here the bundle variable refers to the filesystem location of the app bundle, something like /var/mobile/applications/LONG_UUID_STRING/MyApp.app.
#define kMobileInstallationPlistPath #"/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist"
NSMutableDictionary *appInfoPlist = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:[bundle stringByAppendingPathComponent:#"Info.plist"]];
[appInfoPlist setObject:#"User" forKey:#"ApplicationType"];
[appInfoPlist setObject:bundle forKey:#"Path"];
[appInfoPlist setObject:#{
#"CFFIXED_USER_HOME" : appPath,
#"HOME" : appPath,
#"TMPDIR" : [appPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:#"tmp"]
} forKey:#"EnvironmentVariables"];
[appInfoPlist setObject:appPath forKey:#"Container"];
NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:kMobileInstallationPlistPath];
NSMutableDictionary *mobileInstallation = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListWithData:data options:NSPropertyListMutableContainersAndLeaves format:NULL error:NULL];
NSString *bundleID = [appInfoPlist objectForKey:#"CFBundleIdentifier"];
[[mobileInstallation objectForKey:#"User"] setObject:appInfoPlist forKey:bundleID];
[mobileInstallation writeToFile:kMobileInstallationPlistPath atomically:NO];
Then remove the cached app information SpringBoard stores:
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.springboard-imagecache-icons");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.springboard-imagecache-icons.plist");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.springboard-imagecache-smallicons");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.springboard-imagecache-smallicons.plist");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/SpringBoardIconCache");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/SpringBoardIconCache-small");
remove("/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.IconsCache");
Then notify SpringBoard to reload the list of all applications:
Class __LSApplicationWorkspace = objc_getClass("LSApplicationWorkspace");
[(LSApplicationWorkspace *)[__LSApplicationWorkspace defaultWorkspace] invalidateIconCache:nil];
[(LSApplicationWorkspace *)[__LSApplicationWorkspace defaultWorkspace] registerApplication:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:bundle]];
notify_post("com.apple.mobile.application_installed");

Answer 2

You can do this via OTA distribution, see
http://help.apple.com/iosdeployment-apps/mac/1.1/#app43ad871e
An example plist can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/hramos/774468
Note that you either need the Enterprise Developer Program or collect the UDIDs of your users and include them in your ad-hoc provisioning profile.