Troubleshooting Ad Hoc Distribution under Windows

The topic is very specific, so I hope that this will save someone time.

Before sending my app to the Apple Store, I decided to test
on friends, sending them a profile file and a zip-archive of the application in Ad Hoc Distribution format.

It would seem that it may be easier to drag and drop these files into iTunes and sync
with iphone. But for Windows users, this was not enough ...
')

For Mac OS X users, everything goes smoothly, but Windows users,
iTunes will report that it cannot verify the application. What is wrong?

It turned out that if you pack the application by manual, that is, using Compress
in the Finder menu, the resource fork is included in the archive.

Simply put, this is a directory like "__MACOSX", which becomes visible after unpacking
archive manually. Mac OS X has built-in support for resource fork and does not count
a separate directory, but on Windows it's the other way around.

Therefore, iTunes for Windows simply ignores zip archives, including resource fork,
but there are two possible solutions:

1. Unpack the zip-archive using Windows, delete the "__MACOSX" directory and pack it back
2. Manually create a zip archive on Mac OS X using the console (zip -r ...)

All operations are performed on the application directory: MyCoolApp.app

Update
For geeks there is another 3rd option - manually creating an ipa package:

1. Create a directory in which we will create an archive, eg “tmp”
2. Create a “Payload” subdirectory in the “tmp” directory, where we copy the application directory,
   for example MyCoolApp.app
3. Choose any beautiful picture in png format and copy to the “tmp” directory
   under the name "iTunesArtwork", without the extension ".png"

As a result, the following directory structure “tmp” should be obtained:

Payload / MyCoolApp.app
iTunesArtwork

Next, in the console, go to the "tmp" directory and execute the command:

zip -r -y MyCoolApp.ipa .

Do not forget to substitute the name of your application instead of MyCoolApp.