Say you are building a sample application and you want to distribute it internally to a few coworkers. Instead of going through iTunesConnect and the beta process- which is quite tedious- you would like to install the app on any phone without having to own the phone.

What you are looking for is an adhoc build.

The magic commands:

cordova build ios --device

 /usr/bin/xcrun -sdk iphoneos PackageApplication "$(pwd)/$PROJECT_NAME.app" -o "$(pwd)/$PROJECT_NAME.ipa"

This will generate an IPA bundle inside your project's platform/ios/build/device directory.