I just finished building my app for iOS, it is signed and everything, but I am afraid the App Store will reject it as it has happened to me in the past, so I am looking for a way to maybe host it on a website and make it available to users there. I have the .app file and the .app.DSYM file, but I’ve tested doing that and the iPhone doesn’t recoginize them as apps. Will it work with the IPA? Or is this totally impossible? I’ve looked into alternative application sites but most of them get the app from an iTunes URL (so I’m assuming you already need to have
your app uploaded to the App Store in order to upload it there). Can someone help me out please? I would appreciate it very much.
There is only one company that is allowed to run apps on iOS devices - Apple, hence you are required to have a cert signed by Apple and such apps can only be distributed via App Store. So unlike Android Apple’s apps ecosystem is very strict and doesn’t support alternative stores or sideloading. So unless you want to target “jailbroken” iOS devices (which is in itself dodgy) - you have only 2 options with Apple:
- native (hybrid) app via App Store
- progressive web app (web-site) via web
So if you struggle with passing QA - you can still assess PWA as option.
Thank you! I’ll choose the PWA route then.