How to load .ipa onto iPhone within Catalina?

Before Catalina, we used to be able to drag the .ipa file into iTunes with a device attached.

Now that iTunes is gone, dragging into 'Music' did not do anything.

Thoughts?

Post not yet marked as solved Up vote post of hishak Down vote post of hishak
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Locate your device in a Finder/Locations window, similar to a volume/drive, select and let it load info, then drag/drop that .ipa from another window directly into the first one. You might see a green + icon, then release. Find it on your phone, waiting for it to finish.

Post not yet marked as solved Up vote reply of KMT Down vote reply of KMT

This seems to work fine for Developer provisioning but NOT for Adhoc provisioning. You get the green PLUS but then nothing happens.


For Adhoc builds,

  • open your device information panel in XCode | Devices and Simulators | Devices | Connected
  • drag onto the Installed Apps section
  • Great comment. This helped me. One note - in Xcode 13.3.1, you can find the Devices and Simulators option under Window | Devices and Simulators

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Itunes no longer support that feature to load .ipa into your iPhone by drag and drop in place of Itunes you can use Apple Configurator 2 to load .ipa file you will find it in apple app store on your mac.
By far the easiest way is to locate the device in Finder ... then click on it to see the device info... Just drag the .ipa file anywhere in the device Info window, the drag icon will have a green plus... drop it and voila, the ipa is on your device.
  • This is partially true. A .ipa file is copied to the device but it cannot be installed. When you try to run it in iOS 14.4 there is a message "Unable to install ... " because its integrity could not be verified.

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can i do this on windows and how please

  • Had the same question on Windows since drag and drop no longer worked (swear it did when I tried c. 2 years back). Found this answer in the below thread and it worked for me.

    "I copied the .ipa file from PC, went to iTunes, right-clicked on Devices name in the left side bar and selected "Paste". And that's it. The app was installed on my phone."

    https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/106125

  • just copy the ipa, open itunes, go to edit on the top menu bar (nest to files, view etc...) and paste.

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