How can I make a demo video of an app when I only have an IPA file?

Question

I want to run/test my .ipa file on simulator as i want to take demo video of the app. I searched for two hours now with no result saying yes that it can be done. I have gone through following links. 1) Is there a way to test iOS builds on simulator without the source code? 2) Run apple apps in simulator

NOTE: I do not have source code and i know i can test it by putting it in device. Also my app is not uploaded in app store, so not downloaded from app store.(It is sent by developer).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As others have answered, you cannot run an IPA file on the simulator, because the simulator runs native code on your Mac's x86 CPU while an IPA file only contains code for the device's ARM CPU.

What you can do is run an AirPlay server on your Mac. Install the IPA on your iOS device and turn on mirroring from the device to your Mac. Then record your Mac's screen.

There are several AirPlay server apps for the Mac. One that I've played with is Reflector. It supports recording the device's AirPlay stream directly to a video file, which makes the process even easier.

Answer 2

If the .ipa has been built for distribution then it won't have been compiled for i386, so it won't run on the Simulator; here's an example using one of my Apps:

$ unzip MyApp.ipa
$ cd Payload/MyApp.app
$ xcrun -sdk iphoneos lipo -info MyApp
Architectures in the fat file: MyApp are: armv7 armv7s

Answer 3

Read This Site.

An .ipa file is an iPhone application archive file which stores an iPhone app. It is usually encrypted with Apple's FairPlay DRM technology. Each .ipa file is compressed with a binary for the ARM architecture and can only be installed on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Files with the .ipa extension can be uncompressed by changing the extension to .zip and unzipping.

.ipa files cannot be installed on the iPhone Simulator because they do not contain a binary for the x86 architecture. To run applications on the simulator, original project files which can be opened using the Xcode SDK are required.

For more Info read This Question.