Self-built iOS APP online installation page

For iOS users in mainland China, the phrase "lend me my ID to launch a little rocket" should be familiar. Like "Little Rocket", the price is not expensive, and users are willing to buy it. However, there are still many apps that have been removed from the shelves in China, so I built my own iOS APP online installation page to help the "novice" users around me in one step. It becomes a time-saving and labor-saving solution.

Going back to the situation mentioned above, it is true that users can register/purchase a foreign Apple ID by themselves, and then purchase a Gift Card to recharge or bind an overseas credit card, which can indeed solve the problem on their own, but for "novice" users It is still very time-consuming and labor-intensive. For users who lend their IDs, instructing them to log out of their existing IDs - log in to new IDs - search - and download will be unbearable. I recently saw two good tutorials, and I integrated them here. By analogy, any iOS APP you want to share can be directly installed online. It should be noted that even though the convenience of downloading and installation has been improved, after the installation is completed, when you open it for the first time, you still need to fill in the ID and password of the corresponding APP that you have purchased. After logging in for the first time, due to the iOS mechanism, iTunes is not associated with the App Store. , so iTunes will also log in accordingly. If there is sensitive information, remember to ask the other party to log out or change the password yourself after logging in for the first time.

Preparation

Extract the iOS APP that needs to be shared

The iOS APP is in .ipa format. We need to extract it for users to download. Here I recommend the simplest and official .ipa file extraction method. iTunes 12.6.3.6 is the last version that still supports App management (Click to download), after we download and install it, open iTunes, log in to the ID account that has purchased the corresponding APP, download the required APP, and then right-click "Show in Windows Explorer" in the library. The downloaded .ipa file can be found. Of course, you can also choose "Use Charles to grab old versions of iOS App", this method even enables downloading of historical versions.

Write ipa.plist

The installation of .ipa also requires the ipa.plist file. A sample ipa.plist file is provided below:

items assets kind software-package url Please fill in your ipa download address (for example: http://www.example.com/app.ipa) metadata bundle-identifier Developer information needs to be extracted, see below bundle-version version number kind software title APP name

In the above code, except for bundle-identifier/developer information, the rest can be filled in by yourself based on the actual shared APP and its version.

Extract bundle-identifier/developer information

We use a compression tool to open the extracted .ipa file, and we will see that the general content is as follows: Unzip the iTunesMetadata.plist file, open it with a text editor, and find the softwareVersionBundleId content segment, which contains the bundle-identifier/developer information required in the ipa.plist file. The following is taking Shadowrocket as an example. The bundle-identifier/developer information is com.liguangming.Shadowrocket.

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A beautiful Web-UI

Download

Everything is ready, all we need is the east wind. Next we need a good-looking and easy-to-operate WebUI. Blogger Bi Meng (https://9499460.com) provides a very beautiful Web-UI, original link: https://9499460.com/87.html We first download the source files: Official link: https://files.re/codes/shadowrocket_online.zip Alternate link: https://dl.yorkchou.com/web/shadowrocket_online. zip

Replace file

Since blogger Bimeng’s Web-UI is for the Shadowrocket APP, and the built-in .ipa is owned by him, we need to extract and extract the .ipa file and ipa.plist file as mentioned above. Written to replace.

Modify index.html

Depending on different Apps, we also need to modify the code in index.html. The first is the link to ipa.plist. We can upload ipa.plist to our own server or OSS, etc., but it must be a direct link that can be downloaded directly.

Secondly, blogger Bimeng thoughtfully added a click-to-copy function for ID accounts and passwords, so we need to pay attention to changing the corresponding ID accounts and passwords in index.html to the ID used to extract .ipa above. Account and password. At the same time, the Baidu statistics code and bottom copyright information in index.html can also be modified according to your needs.

Modify App Icon

The icon.jpg and favicon.ico under /assets/images/ in the compressed package are the icon and website icon of the App respectively, which need to be generated and replaced by yourself according to the actual situation.

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Done

At this point, all preparations have been completed. Upload the .ipa file and WebUI to the server/virtual space and create a website. But don’t forget that the website must have an SSL certificate. I believe that with the help of Let’s Encrypt, This is not too difficult for you webmasters.

Reference link, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the author of the following article: 1. Create an iOS app online download page – Newlearner’s website https://www.newlearner.site /2018/12/22/iosapp-donwloading-online.html

Excerpt from this article: https://yorkchou.com/ios-app-installation.html

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