Generating an IPA file for a flutter project without a paid dev account

Question

I just finished a Flutter mobile app and I want to install it on my personal iPhone. I know about the 7 days restriction, but buying an apple dev account for 99$/year was a bit too much for me so I used an external service. You pay them a little bit of money and give them your iPhone's udid and they give you back the certificate and provisioning profile files and you can use an external signer to sign your apps. I have already done this for an app of mine a few month ago. But now I'm struggling with generating the ipa. How can I generate the ipa file with the free apple account?

Answer 1

He again, so the way to generate an unsigned flutter ipa is by first going to Xcode and changing the build configuration of the scheme to Release :

1. Click on Runner, and Edit scheme

2. Select Release for the Build Configuration of the Run schema

And then on the terminal in Android Studio run the following command :

flutter build ios --release

This will take a minute or two and when it's done go to this folder : your-app/build/ios/Release-iphoneos and you should find your runner.app file. Create a folder named PayLoad next to it and copy and paste the runner.app file inside this folder. After that you wanna compress your Payload to get a new file named Payload.zip. Change its extension to ipa and you're done. You can now use whatever you want to codesign this ipa file.