Question

I’m going to develop an iPhone app, and want to make sure what I want to do is possible, and will be approved by Apple.

I’m going to create an app that will be fully branded on per submission basis. I want to have one app per customer (our customers are companies) with their logo, skin, etc.
This apps will be downloaded and installed by the employees of each one of our customers.
In other words, we would use the same base code (logic doesn’t change), but will brand it for each customer. Something similar to what Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/mobile) does, they created an Ecommerce mobile app, and they brand it to their customer, but the app logic remains the same.

Would Apple consider this as duplicate apps? what is the best way to do it?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I can say I know of several companies built on this strategy. The code doesn’t change one iota from app to app, only images and names change and they continue to bring in revenue.

EDIT: Note this is against apple policy and if they find out they have been known to ban accounts. They consider it spamming and prefer that you sell one app that provides in app purchases. Directly from their feedback on a particular group of app submissions:

Thank you for submitting your
Photography apps to the App Store.

We’ve completed the review of your
apps, however, we are unable to post
them to the App Store because they
provide the same feature set and
simply vary the content. Apps that
replicate functionality with different
content create clutter in the App
Store, hindering users’ ability to
find apps, and do not comply with the
App Store Review Guidelines
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html:

   2.20   Developers 'spamming' the App Store with many versions of 
   similar apps will be removed from the
   iOS Developer Program