Question

I am developing three in-house apps and we want to distribute the apps to 40 iPads. But we dont want them all to be registered as development devices, we want to have the apps in the store. When I tried ad-hoc distribution, it never worked. I tried to install the apps after registering the device.

So I thought is there anyway that we can distribute the in-house apps through app store instead of going through this painful app distribution?

Answer 1

Presumably you would have an Enterprise Developer license ($299/year) which is for exactly the scenario you have: you want to develop and distribute apps to your organization. This type of license exists precisely for this purpose and because Apple doesn’t really want these kinds of apps — apps that are not generally for everyone — to be on the App Store.

To distribute your apps under this license you need to look at Apple’s Mobile Device Management architecture. It basically lets you setup your own legitimate “store” through which your apps would be distributed to your organization’s devices. It is not intended for you to sell your apps to the general public, bypassing Apple. No, no.

I cannot seem to find a good link for you. Google for “apple mobile device management documentation” or “apple mdm”; there are a lot of interesting PDFs that come up.

Bottom line is that this is, I think, a fair bit of work to setup this infrastructure. But necessary if you want to do internal app distribution the right way.