Problem with ipa file

[teacherguy]

Lately I have been having issues with my ipa files. At first I thought testflight was the issue, but then I tried BetaBuilder and still had the same problem: The app will not finish installing on the iOS devices. It stalls and then says "could not be installed."

So I connected my phone in XCode, then dropped the ipa file onto it. The response from XCode is: ...ipa is not a valid archive (could not locate file within archive).

The file within of course is the .app file, which runs fine in the simulator and on my phone when I drop it in using XCode.

[Mark]

Hi,

Why do you want to use an IPA file and how did you create it?

Kind regards,

Mark

[teacherguy]

Hi Mark,

Testflight requires an ipa file for uploading. Over the past several weeks I have created it by dropping the .app into iTunes which makes an ipa. Since experiencing this loading problem I have also created it manually by making the required "Payload" folder and dropping the .app into it, zipping, and then renaming with the ipa extension.

[Mark]

Hi,

Do you have an old IPA file that used to work and can you test if that still works?

Open the terminal and type "cd" (without quotes). Unzip the new folder and drag it into the terminal. Press enter and type "ls -a" to view it's contents. Do you see any invisible files such as .DS_Store? Perhaps you should remove those files before making an IPA file.

As far as I know, XCode doesn't work with IPA files and it doesn't make sense to try.

Perhaps you can ask Testflight for help. If their site is able to detect invalid files, then it should also be able to tell you why it is invalid.

Kind regards,

Mark

[teacherguy]

No invisible files in the package contents (I was hopeful though).

[teacherguy]

Update: This might be total coincidence, I'll have to test further, but after trying so many different things I decided to change the location of the standalone builds. I had been building to a directory outside of the project folder. I changed the build to reside inside the project folder. I then created the ipa, uploaded to testflight, and it works.

Any insights as to why this would matter?

[seaniepie]

How are you creating your ipa file? Do you create a plist file and how?

Pi

[teacherguy]

I drop the standalone file onto iTunes, then drag it out of iTunes to the desktop. For whatever reason, iTunes turns it into an ipa.