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How should an enterprise app developer distribute IOS apps to its customers?

  • We have IOS clients for enterprise apps we license to our customers. These apps are not of general consumer interest and are sold to large companies. We are looking for the ideal mechanism for distributing these apps in a controlled fashion to our enterprise customers.  Typically, the IT departments there would like to make available these apps from their internal web sites. An enterprise can signup for the Enterprise Developer Program ($299/year) and distribute apps to its employees.  This is apparently on a per enterprise basis. It seems tedious to require all our customers to sign up for this program and create custom builds signed with their certificates and profiles for each customer we sign up. A developer can also distribute apps via the App Store. This is straightforward but this gets unwanted downloads and associated random queries. Is there an alternate approach ? Is it permissible for an enterprise developer to distribute apps to multiple customers using its Enterprise Developer Program credentials?

  • Answer:

    No, this violates the terms and conditions of the Apple Enterprise Developer agreement that you signed.  Specifically, these articles from the agreement apply with regard to what you are allowed to distribute:  (d) Distribute Provisioning Profiles only to Your Employees and only in conjunction with Your Internal Use Applications for the purpose of developing and testing Your Internal Use Applications; (e) Distribute Provisioning Profiles only to Your Employees in conjunction with Your deployment of Your Internal Use Applications on Deployment Devices for internal use by Your Employees; and (f) Allow Your Customers to use Your Internal Use Applications, but only (i) on Your physical premises, or (ii) in other locations, provided all such use is under the direct supervision and physical control of Your Employees (e.g., a sales presentation to a Customer). Except as set forth in Section 2.1(f), You may not use, distribute or otherwise make Your Internal Use Applications available to Your Customers or to any third parties in any way. So your customers WILL have to have their own Enterprise Developer agreement in place and you WILL need to use their credentials for any apps you create for them.

Jeff Wade at Quora Visit the source

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Your customers will have to sign your app with their own enterprise certificate. You can host your app and ask them to download, and sign it and then push it their users using MDMs Or MAMs . Or you should set authentication for your app, and upload it to iTunes and GooglePlay. Then ask your customers to provide the authentication keys to their users along with the link to iTunes & GooglePlay. That way you won't have to sign the app, manage the versions or use MDMs or MAMs at all.

Megan Yahya

Perhaps the Volume Purchase Program is better suited to your needs? http://www.apple.com/business/vpp/

Wes Nolte

I'm in the same scenario described by the OP, except I'm willing to bear the tedium of having my customer purchase their own iOS Developer Enterprise Program membership. If I do that, am I compliant with the program terms, even though their "in-house app" is really an app that I wrote? - VPP doesn't address two key requirements I have: 1) Rapid hotfix deployment in order to meet my SLA. I still have to slog through App Store review even if my customer is blocked. 2) I can only distribute the newest version of my app. This is doable but costly for me because my app relies on an on-premises server, and the version can vary. So my iOS app would have to be backward compatible with every version of my server. Good practice to be sure, but very impactful to my QA matrix.

Anonymous

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