Developers can Now Distribute Free Copies of their iPhone App by Issuing Promotional Codes

July 2009

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Apple has started allowing iPhone developers a better way to distribute free promotional copies of their iPhone apps once it has been approved to the App Store by Apple.

Earlier iPhone developers had to rely either on ad-hoc distribution which was painful to provide review or promotional copies of their iPhone apps.

Developers can now distribute free copies of their iPhone app by issuing promotional codes.

The new system works as follows:

The iPhone developer sends a promotional code which can then be used in the iTunes App Store by using the "Redeem Link" to download a full copy of the application for free.

You can see the screenshot of the message after redeeming a promotional code.

Strangely, the promotional codes can only be used in the U.S. iTunes Stores.

The process is a lot simpler than ad-hoc distribution. In case of Ad-hoc, the iPhone developer had to first find out the unique device identifier (UDID) of the iPhone and then create a mobile provisioning file - a security certificate that authorizes that unique device to run the iPhone App.

The new system limits the number of promotional codes to 50 which gets reset for each new version of an application which I think is too small a number. Apple has not scrapped the ad-hoc method of distribution so if developers hit the limit on promotional codes can use the ad-hoc distribution method to distribute 100 more copies.

I would ideally like to see a method where iPhone users can try out an iPhone app before buying it. iPhone developers have tried to workaround this problem by releasing "Lite" version of their iPhone apps with limited functionality but that's not the ideal both from a user's or a developer's point of view.

But this is a step in the right direction by Apple.

What do you think?

[via Mac Rumors]

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