This is now outdated after Meteor 1.3
You can track the following issue here to test/see new workarounds.
Meteor App With Different Meteor Server
A lot of people wanted to know how to develop a Meteor app (web or mobile) that uses a different Meteor server backend. This is how.
For mobile, I only tested using Android, though this should theoretically work for iOS as well. If you don't know already here's how to get mobile set up for Meteor.
There's two basic Meteor apps in here.
To demonstrate how this works, the remote-server Meteor app will act as the remote Meteor server (running on localhost:4000) and the app will be your web or mobile app (running on localhost:3000), which will connect to your remote-server Meteor server. Also, I demonstrate user authentication using accounts-password to the remote-server.
Getting Started
Open up two terminals.
git clone https://github.com/rclai/meteor-app-with-remote-server.git
cd meteor-app-with-remote-server
Terminal 1: Starting the "remote" server.
cd remote-server
sh run.sh
Terminal 2: Starting your client/mobile app.
cd app
If you want to run as a web app:
sh run-as-web-app.sh
If you want to run as a mobile app:
Take your machine's IP address (by using ifconfig or equivalent), and set it in the --mobile-server flag in the run-as-mobile-app.sh file, making sure it is port 4000.
Modify packages/autoupdate/autoupdate_cordova.js line 15, and change rootUrl to use your IP address, making sure it is port 3000.
Make sure your phone is connected to the same network as your machine (WiFi connection most likely, unless your phone uses an Ethernet cable, which would be mind-blowing).
Finally:
sh run-as-mobile-app.sh
Test out hot code reload and see it just work.
How Does This Work?
I copied the Meteor autoupdate core package and modified it to make sure it uses the app's DDP connection because by default, Meteor uses the same URL as DDP_DEFAULT_CONNECTION_URL for handling hot code reloads.
For Cordova, I also had to make sure that the download URL pointed to my machine's IP address with port 3000 (See here).
Eventually Meteor will hopefully give you the ability to pass in an explicit autoupdate URL. Here's the issue.