iOS App deployment without AppStore

Question

I'm developping an App in my company. We want to distribute this App to our customers but without using the AppStore from Apple, is it possible?

I heard about MDM (mobile device manager) but I'm not really sure if it will cover this need?

I heard also about Enterprise developer license for in house deployment but if I'm understanding correctly it means the App can be deployed only inside my company and not to our customers, is it correct?

Thanks for your clarifications.

Seb

Answer 1

If you are trying to get apps to customers without the App Store, you have options, but none of them are awesome.

There are many choices for over the air distribution of the binary, that really isn't the complicated part. You've got MDM solutions, HockeyKit, TestFlight, Manual server manipulation - all are fairly easy and well documented.

Where things get nasty is in the signing. If you definitely do not want to participate in the App Store environment (no app store, no Volume Purchase Program), you only have two real options:

• Ad Hoc - Limited to 100 Devices. Devices must be explicitly added to a provision.
• Enterprise - No device limit, devices do not need to explicitly added to provisions. In effect, these builds will run on any device ; the caveat, you are not legally allowed to distribute these builds to anyone outside your company.

If you intend on developing an application for some other company and their employees, then your only viable option is to sign the final build with a signing certificate attached to said company's development account. The enterprise signing route is a really great approach, if you can get the company to sign all the paperwork to get their own developer account, owned by them.

Answer 2

For stock iOS devices, you really have only 4 choices:

1) Ad Hoc distribution to up to 100 total max devices per iOS Developer enrollment (including wireless Ad Hoc via manifest file & SSL.)

2) Enterprise distribution for distribution to employees of corporations with a D&B rating.

3) Apple's iTunes App store if your app is approved by Apple. (This includes the B2B program and account/password protected apps.) (This now also includes up to 1000 people using Apple's new Testflight service.)

4) Unlimited distribution to other people who have their own individual, company or enterprise iOS/Apple Developer enrollments. The distribution can be either as an Xcode project with source code or a pre-compiled library, or as an ipa or archive file that the customer can (re)codesign with their own Developer certificates. For applications priced at well over $99 per customer, the cost of this annual developer program enrollment might only be a slight additional cost to the customer (and given appropriate legal authorizations, might even be handled as an annual paid service.)

4 b.) ADDED UPDATE: As of Apple's release of Xcode 7 (in late 2015), anyone with just a free Apple ID can use Xcode 7 on their Mac to install apps from build-able Xcode projects directly to their own tethered iOS devices this way, with no need to pay $99 to Apple to enroll. See this answer.

This essentially allows unlimited distribution to anyone with physical access to a current Mac and who knows how to run Xcode.

Options (1), (2) and (4) do not require going through App store approval. There are no other options for distributing apps to stock OS iOS devices.

Answer 3

You could take a look at https://testflightapp.com/ . We use that a lot for customers that only need a app for testing doing the development phase and for apps that are used for conventions (limited time, limited number of units).

Testflight is very easy to use for both developers and end-users, but it is not very well suited for apps that are going to be used on a large numbers of devices, since all devices that are installed to needs to be in your provisioning profile which has a limited number of slots.

EDIT The testfligt approch is no longer valid. You can now use the TestFlight integrated into itunesconnect. Alternatively you could integrate crashlytics.com , at use their distribution system. It works pretty weill