Can't figure out how to send iOS Apps Ad Hoc to certain iPhones using Xamarin on Visual Studio 2019

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OK, so I created an app using Xamarin. I am wanting to push the app through Visual Studio 2019 on a Windows computer to certain iPhones. I included the my profile on Apple Developer website. You can tell it is ad hoc

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Now I am in Visual Studio 2019, you can see I am using the correct provisioning profile

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Now when I go to the Archive Manager in Visual Studio 2019 I see a couple of options

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When I click Ad Hoc, I only see an option to "Save as". I don't know what to do beyond this point? Unlike when I push App Store, which uploads it to the store.

Please what do I do, what am I missing

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xamarin.forms xamarin visual-studio-2019 xamarin.ios ios
1 Answers

That's the idea behind an Ad-Hoc build. The build is used to produce a file that is ready to be installed for the predefined devices. The file type can be either .xcarchive, or .ipa.

Quote from the official docs:

You distribute your app by providing the .ipa file for users to install on their devices. Because you select a valid ad hoc provisioning profile to archive the app, users don’t need to install the profile on their device, only the .ipa file. Users can use iTunes to install the app on their devices. If users want to use Xcode to install the app on their device, share the archive as an .xcarchive file package.

Basically, Apple guides you how to create a package or an archive which will be ready for distribution, but how these files will be distributed is up to the developer.

If you choose Save As in the last step/picture, you will have a distribution-ready .ipa file. You then need to deliver/send this file to the provisioned devices' owners. You can distribute it in 2 ways:

  1. Follow the steps from the documentation. Unfortunately, this means that the user, that will have to have a Mac, in order to install the .ipa file through the iTunes. I haven't tried it on a Windows machine, but I doubt that it will work.

  2. If you wish to simplify the whole installation process, you can go with uploading the file somewhere and sending the link to the users. Here, we can take 2 paths again:

    a) Host it on your own. However keep in mind that this will require additional setup. There is plenty of steps only how to achieve this, but here's one way. How to Install .ipa file to iPhone from Web Link?

    b) Host it somewhere else. There are plenty of sites/cloud providers that can handle that for you. Personally, I am using Diawi, but I read somewhere that Dropbox should also work out of the box.

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