How to send .ipa to Airwatch MDM

Question

I have a problem on how to send the .ipa of my application to a client using MDM Airwatch.

He told me that they already have another application provider, who sends .ipa files, and after putting them into Airwatch they are been distributed to all the phones of the company, without sending them a provisioning profile or anything.

I have and IOS developer account, but as I supposed, after sending a .ipa signed with my provisioning profile, the application is only installed on the phones which UDID I have registered ...

What is the way to send a .ipa to be used in this MDM?

Answer 1

If you want to distribute an iOS app to devices without having to register the devices' UDID first, you will need to use en Enterprise In House Distribution profile. If you are developing the app on behalf of another company, you should either ask them to provide you with their signing identity (the private key, certificate, and provisioning profile) so you can build the app and it will appear as another app provided by their company. Or you can provide them the IPA and request that they re-sign the binary themselves before putting it in their MDM system for distribution.

If they already have another developer doing this, I would see which way the other dev is doing it and follow the same procedure.

A third possible option is that the other application developer you mention has their own enterprise developer account and is sending them an IPA signed with an in house distribution profile. An enterprise developer account is $399 / year at this point and requires you to have a company tax ID number.