What is the correct mime-type for serving an iPhone .ipa file?

Question

I\'m trying to post .ipa files onto our apache web server for our beta testers to download. Currently I\'m using the following line in .htaccess to serve the files:

Answer 1

I suggest you look into Hockey which seems like a good way to distribute Ad Hoc updates more seamlessly. php based though.

Answer 2

I voted up the other answers as they were both helpful, but this is what I ended up needing to fix the problem.

AddType application/octet-stream .ipa
<Files *.ipa>
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</Files>

Answer 3

A .ipa file is a zip file:

$ file 'Kindle 2.2.1.ipa' 
Kindle 2.2.1.ipa: Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract

That's likely why IE is helpfully changing the extension for you. Microsoft's documentation seems to indicate that might be the case:

Internet Explorer sets the file name extension of a downloaded file based on a few pieces of information available from the HTTP server and from the file itself.