🇬🇧British Expat 🇨🇦Vancouver ❤ Gardening 💰Founder of gitSQL

Category: Android

Mobile App Server

Serve Google Android and Apple iOS applications to Mobile Devices.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/mobile-app-server

The Problem

One day at the office, I noticed my QA colleague struggle to get an Apple iOS app onto their iPhone for testing.

Typically we use online services such as https://www.diawi.com/ to present us with a QR code.

We then use this to download an .ipa application onto the mobile device using a QR code reader.

Earlier that day I was generating Google Android and Apple iOS packages via a Jenkins build server.

That’s when I thought;

“Wouldn’t it be great to serve the files out locally for download?”

The solution

I was looking for an on-premise Diawi service!

I searched high and low to see if anyone had done something like this before. Nothing came close to what I needed but I did find a useful package that enabled reading of IPA and APK packages.

I used this package and set up a Expressjs  application that would serve out files on a web interface.

Serving an Apple iOS package required a secure server so I set up the application over HTTPS as default with instructions on how to set up a self certified key and certificate.

Main Features

  1. Automatically discovers new Apps on page refresh, simply add files to path.
  2. Designed for Local Intranet usage, but could be deployed to cloud.
  3. Provides package information and QR Code per app.
  4. Secured on HTTPS – Requires an SSL certificate (Self Cert or Full).

Summary

If you are looking for an in house web based file server to serve mobile applications then this could be a valid solution. The service watches a folder to check for changes, new files, deletion of files. Subsequently browsing to the website will reflect the contents of the folder being watch.

Roadmap

  1. Drag and Drop app addition of files via Web Interface.
  2. App Icons.
  3. Extended package information.

Would you like any more features?

Get in touch, I would be happy to develop this further.

Alternatively, feel free to fork/pull request enhancements into the repository.

https://github.com/anupsaund/mobile-app-server

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