Now that you have your Mobilizer application developed you would like to distribute it to your customers. This article describes how to publish Mobilizer applications on the different stores such as Apple’s AppStore, Android market or BlackBerry AppStore.

First of all, you must understand that distributing B2B our B2E enterprise applications on stores can be tricky as no store can restrict application availability to a given company or enterprise. This means that applications you will publish will be seen by the entire planet! In most of cases, this is not a problem that Enterprise applications needs credentials to access the back end applications. Your employees or customers only, will provide these credentials.

In any other case we suggest you to publish your application as WebApps, which is automatically generated when you develop a Mobilizer app. To publish a WebApp, just send to your users the WebApp’s url.

Mobilizer uses PhoneGap’s technology to build native applications to be deployed on stores. Most of the process described here comes from the standard PhoneGap deployment process, but they are some tips and tricks that are written here to help you in your provisioning process.

• 1 - First of all, you will have to create your own PhoneGap build account.
  Go to https://build.phonegap.com, enter you email address and hit the «register with the beta» button. You will receive a valid phone gap account

 



 

 

• 2 - Then, configure your Convertigo Server to use this account for the PhoneGap build process.
  To do this, go to the Convertigo Server admin console, login, click on the «Configuration» icon and select the «Mobile Builder» section. Fill in the «Mobile Builder username» with the PhoneGap build account (email address) and the «Mobile Builder password» with PhoneGap Build password.
  
  

Publishing on the Apple's App store

Your convertigo server is now properly configured. Now we will prepare needed stuff for Apple’s AppStore. You must know that deploying on the Apple’s AppStore requires an Apple Mac Computer, as most of the tools needed only runs on Macs. !

As you probably know, iOS development requires signing the .IPA files. You can sign for 2 different usages:

• Development usage : Will allow you to install the IPA files via iTunes on the developer’s devices. You will have to declare in Apple’s provisioning portal each device on which your applications will run. This usage is not suitable for deployment.
• AppStore usage : Will allow you to upload the IPA file to Apple’s AppStore.

We will describe here the AppStore signing process. The developer signing process is similar. The only thing that changes is the type of provisioning profile and the certificate used. Please read about the developer signing process documentation in Apple’s provisioning portal.

Let’s start now with the AppStore signing process:

• You will need an official Apple’s «iOS Developer Program» account. This is the only way to get access to publish applications on the store. You can enroll here http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios costing 99$/year. Once enrolled you will have access to the provisioning portal.
• Goto to https://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/overview/index.action, login with your Apple developer account, go to the «Distribution» menu (on the left) and the “Distribution” Tab. Open the «Obtaining your iOS Distribution Certificate» section and read the «Generating a Certificate Signing Request» Section. Follow the instructions, note that you will need a Mac computer execute. This will result to create an App Store distribution certificate the provisioning portal.
• Read the «Saving your Private Key and Transferring to Other Systems» section, and follow the instructions. Save the «.P12» file as you will need it later on to configure your PhoneGap account.
• Go now to https://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/provisioningprofiles/viewDistributionProfiles.action and create an App Store provisioning profile. To do this click on the «New Profile» button resulting with the following screen :
  
  





• Fill in the Profile name, for Example « AppStore Distribution profile»
• Select in App ID the «Xcode: Wildcard AppID».
• Click the «Submit» button.

You now have an AppStore distribution provisioning profile created associated to your AppStore signing certificate.

• Go to https://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/provisioningprofiles/viewDistributionProfiles.action, you should view the distribution provisioning profile screen.
• Click on the «Download button» next to your provisioning profile and download the xxx.mobileprovision file.

You now have 2 important files you will have to upload to your PhoneGap build account, the «.P12» key and the «XXX.mobileprovision» file. To do this, follow these steps:

• Connect to PhoneGap build, using your user/pwd.
• Configure your account by clicking on the «Edit account» link located at the bottom of the page.
  
  



 

• On the «Edit your account» page, click on the «Signing button»
  
  



 

You will see all the current signing keys configured with your PhoneGap account. Click the «add key» link in the iOS section and follow the instructions to upload the xxx.mobileprovision and the .P12 file you got from the previous steps.

You now have your signing keys properly configured in PhoneGap build. Normally you should be able to set this key as default in PhoneGap’s UI but seems there is a bug for now that prevents us to do this. Convertigo build process will trigger PhoneGap’s build using APIs. Unfortunately as this API can’t specify yet the signing key to be used, and as the default key is not working, each time a Convertigo Build is launched the following steps must be performed:

• Login on the Phonegap Build
• In the App list, Click on icon of the App you want to publish.
  
  



 

• Click on the Blue «Edit» button, and on the edit page, click on the «Signing button» on the left.
  
  





• In the iOS combo box, select the Signing Key you created in the previous steps. And return to the Application List page. PhoneGap will now rebuild the apps with the correct Signing Keys. When the build is finished, just click on the «IPA» button in the Application list to download the IPA file to your computer.

You are nearly done! Last thing to do is to upload your .IPA file to Apple’s App store. To do that, we will need a tool only running on the Mac computer, the «Application Loader». This tool should be installed automatically if Apple’s Xcode (iOS development tools) has been installed.

Before running the App Loader, you will have to Sign in the Apple’s Store portal called «iConnect». Go to https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa and sign in using your Apple ID (The same used previously in provisioning portals). Follow all the instruction there. There are a lot of declarations, contract setting etc … Read all the Apple stuff and forums to set up this correctly. Once this is done, you will have the opportunity to create a new application entry in the store. Again, follow Apple’s instruction. Set up all the marketing material (description, Screen shots icons etc …) and when finished, you application status will switch to «Waiting for upload». This is the time for you to use this «Application Loader» tool to upload your .IPA file to AppStore.

The status of your app will switch to «Waiting for approval», you just have to wait (and pray) for Apple to validate your app in its Store!

Publishing to the Android market

Android Market distribution is much simpler as there is no validation process done by Google. To deploy on the Android market you will also need some signing information to be uploaded to PhoneGap build. First of all you will have to create a self signed certificate. Follow the instructions on Android’s web site: http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/app-signing.html#cert. As stated, use the:

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-release-key.keystore -alias alias_name -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

Command. This runs perfectly under Linux or windows as long as your Java SDK is installed and you have a PATH to it. Answer all the questions and create the “my-release-key.keystore” file. You will be asked 2 passwords. One is to protect the private key, the other one is to protect the keystore file. We recommend to use the same passwords for both. Then follow the following steps to upload the keystore file to PhoneGap (This is very similar to the one described for iOS):

• Connect to PhoneGap build, using your user/pwd.
• Configure your account by clicking on the “Edit account” link located at the bottom of the page.
• On the “Edit your account” page, click on the “Signing button”
• You will see all the current signing keys configured with your PhoneGap account. Click the “add key” link in the “Android” section and follow the instructions to upload the keystore file you got from the previous steps.

Again, as for the iOS, PhoneGap seems to have a bug that prevents us to set this key as default. You will have to follow the same procedure in order to set the correct Android sign key for the app you are building (See above).