Wireless Distribution

Wireless Distribution

How to distribute your Experience Sampler app wirelessly

We will now show you how to package your app for distribution and create a website for participants to download your app.

iOS Distribution

Signing Your App

iOS apps must first be signed by a distribution certificate before it can be distributed. Learn how to do sign your app in this app distribution guide from Apple.

Creating an Archive

You will then need to package your app for distribution by creating an archive. Learn how to archive your app here.

Customizing your plist file

Next, you will have to edit the iOSApp.plist file. This is required for Wireless Distribution.
  1.      1. Upload the .ipa file to your Dropbox account.
  2.      2. Get the shared link of the app.plist by selecting app.plist in Dropbox and then clicking Share link.
         It will have the form www.dropbox.com/…./appName.ipa?dl=0
  3.      3. Paste the link somewhere and replace www.dropbox.com with dl.dropbox.usercontent.com
  4.      4. Paste the updated URL in line 14 of the template plist file
  5.      5. Repeat Steps 1 to 3 for the icon file and the iTunesArtwork file.
  6.      6. Paste the updated URL for the iTunesArtwork file in line 22 of the template plist file
  7.      7. Paste the updated URL for the icon file in line 30 of the template plist file.
  8.      8. Edit the metadata to reflect information relevant to the app (e.g., bundle-identifier, bundle-version, and title).

Wireless Distribution

Finally, you can use Dropbox as a free secure web server to distribute the iOS version of your app wirelessly.
  1.      1. Upload the app.plist file to Dropbox
  2.      2. Get the shared link of the plist file by selecting the plist file in Dropbox and then clicking Share link.
         It will have the form www.dropbox.com/…./app.plist?dl=0
  3.      3. Paste the link somewhere and replace www.dropbox.com with dl.dropbox.usercontent.com
  4.      4. Then replace the url information for the app.plist in the template app download HTML file provided
  5.      5. Upload the download HTML file to your server

Grant Enterprise Developer Permission to Install App on Device

Once the iOS version of the app is downloaded onto the participant's device, you will need to go to Settings > General. Scroll down to Device Management and click on it. You will see the name of your Enterprise Developer Account. Indicate that you allow your Enterprise Developer Account to install the app. See this page for more details.

Don't Have a Server?
If you don't have a server, you can also create a download page through GitHub Pages. You can find the instructions here.

Android Distribution

Signing Your App

Android apps also need to be signed before they can be distributed. Learn how to sign your Android app in Android Studio or manually.

Signing Android App Manually
You can also create and sign your Android app using the Cordova CLI. This is our preferred method.
  1.      1. Generate a private key using keytool with the following command:
              keytool –genkey –v –keystore name.keystore –alias alias_name
         -keyalg RSA –keysize 2048 –validity 10000
         where name is the name of your keystore and alias_name is a name that will be used later when signing the app
  2.      2. Answer the questions presented.
  3.      3. Create a new file called release-signing.properties in a text editor program (e.g., TextWrangler or TextEdit) and place it in the
         platform/android/     folder with a keystore path and alias name:
                    keystore=/path to keystore/name.keystore
                    key.alias=alias_name
    4.      For an example of the release-signing.properties file, please click here.
  4.      4. Type the following command into CLI and follow the prompts:
              cordova build android --release
  5.      5. The signed APK will appear in the build/outputs/apk folder with the default name of android-release.apk
Once the APK is signed, you can distribute the app by simply emailing the APK file to interested participants. To install apps outside of Google Play, participants will need to change their Security Settings to allow installation from "Unknown sources." To do this, instruct research assistants or participants to go to Settings > Applications and then select Unknown sources and Verify apps.

Wireless Distribution

You can also distribute your app wirelessly by uploading the APK file to Dropbox. Then follow Steps 1 to 4 outlined for iOS Wireless Distribution for the APK file.

Now you're ready to test your app, collect your data, and make sure your participants are completing their surveys!