Enterprise In-House App distribution

Question

I'm developing an iPad application for a company. Because of confidentiality reasons they do not want to publish the app to the app-store.

The fulfill the enterprise program requirements but they have not participated yet. The company wants to know how the distribution process is. I've dived into apples documentation jungle and i'm a little confused about the provisioning profiles. Due to the confidentiality reasons I'd like to use the apple security api using DeviceLock with configuration profiles so I came across with MDM-Servers.

Now my actual question: Do I still need the UDID of every Device I want to use with enterprise program AND if yes, can I push new provisioning profiles (with new devices) to all existing devices via MDM-Server without recompiling and redistribute the whole app?

Answer 1

You definitely don't!

You can distribute the app via

• In-House Distribution: Building with that profile will create an .ipa and a .plist file. You put that on a website that is protected via basic authentication. Put a link to the plist file on the site in the below format. Then you can just browse to that site with any ios-device, type in your credentials, click on the link and install the app.

<a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://myDomain.de/path/to/the/MyApp-Version.plist">Download my cool App!</a> 

• Ad-Hoc Distribution (Also possible with Developer Program for Beta-Testing up to 100 devices): Here you use device-ids. You build the app and get an .ipa and a .mobileprovision file (a certificate needed to install the app). You send those 2 files to a customer and he installs it via itunes (not sure if he can open it directly from the mail on the device).