Different provisioning profiles for App Store and in house needed?

Question

My company is developing an iOS application that gets distributed in the App Store. A customer with a few hundred employees now wants to distribute our application with his own mobile device management software.

He suggested that we

• create a provisioning profile
• compile the app as "in house"
• give them the provisioning profile and IPA file

He also mentioned that our app currently doesn't even have a prov profile (which freaks me out - I thought an app has to have one because it couldn't be submitted to the App Store otherwise).

Does his suggestion make sense? Can we compile our app for the App Store AND in house, using different provisioning profiles? Are they even needed? Could our customer do any harm once he has this profile? I'm not that deep into all this profile and certificate stuff (I just followed yet another tutorial to initially create all certificates you need to develop for the App Store), so thanks for your help.

Answer 1

There are two ways you can do this.

First one is register as apple enterprise application developer.Use enterprise distribution certificate to distribute apps in house. You can setup your own environment on servers to upload iPA files along with plist.Then you can give download link to customers. By opening link on phone browser users can able to install app.check this link https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/enterprise/.

Second one is you can distribute apps privately to targeted business using apple B2B delivery. In this approach submit apps to app store for B2B delivery and app is available for download only for targeted customers. check this link https://developer.apple.com/programs/volume/b2b/

Answer 2

Yes you can create Appsotore profile for distribution in store and Developer/Ad-Hoc profile for inhouse distribution. You may add 100 users per account per year for Developer/Adhoc Profile.

So as an alternative you can create Appstore profile and export app's ipa file with that profile. Provide this ipa to customer to distribute in his team. You can also distribute ipa via web if you have hosting. It will download in mobile same as testflight was doing.

I hope it may help you.