over the air ad hoc distribution “Unable to download”

Question

I am trying to distribute an iphone app ad hoc internally for a beta test to 3 users, myself (iphone 4) and two others (iPad 2, iphone 3G). My device served as the development device as well. I followed all of the Apple documentation, archived the app and prepared it for enterprise deployment. I put it on my web server with the .plist manifest file. To test it out, I installed it on my own device (which again, is the development device), and it worked swell. So then I sent the link to my other 2 users, who then reported that they received a message that said they are "unable to download." So first I thought that it might be a problem with the UDID, which it is not. I had my user's download a UDID sender-app, and they matched up perfectly. That was after I asked this question: What is the MIME type for .mobileprovision in which I wanted to know the MIME type for a .mobileprovision file. I took this info, and then also sent out a link to the provisioning profile. Both of my test users could download and install the .mobileprovision file fine; the problem was when they again, tried to install the app. One user got a message that said "cannot connect to server www.myserver.com" while the other one installed 80% of the app, before getting the "unable to download" message with 2 options: "retry" and "done."

I am at a loss. Does anybody have any ideas? I am desperate! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Try using TestFlightApp.com. It's free, and basically helps automate the process of doing over-the-air ad-hoc testing.

"Unable to download" seems to be a catch-all message that something is not right - either your ipa and your mobileprovision file don't match, or your provision file doesn't include the right UDID, or possibly there are just connectivity issues.

Answer 2

For the ones who don't use testflight, check the Deployment Target under the Summary page. Maybe you set it too high, which is not always necessary.

Once I created a new App which Xcode automatically set the latest target for me, which was 5.1.1, but the user was using 5.0.x. I changed it back to 4.0 with very small code change(weak->assign), and then it worked.

Answer 3

I know it's probably too late to help you, but i had a similiar problem. The application would download, and then when i could see "Installing" there was a popup with message described by OP.
The asnwear was to remove provisioning profile from ipad and restart the device.

Settings/general/profile/remove

As a note, the first provisioning profile was uploaded to device via cable from macbook.

Answer 4

This is an another case of the problem. You should register device's UDID first, before exporting ipa. The devices that registered UDID after exporting ipa, those are unable to download the ipa.