Hacker News Reader

Is this a new feature? How did corporate apps get distributed prior to this?

You can publish applications yourself using an enterprise certificate. You have to host and distribute it, although MDM systems can do this for you and roll it out to all your users automatically.

You can also publish on the App Store, but only make it visible / available to specific customers where they buy seats in bulk and get redemption codes for people to install through the App Store.

This seems like a bit of a simplification of the second approach.

They were just public listed apps. You’d have a corporate app on the normal store which would just hit a login wall. Not really that big of a deal but not as nice as an unlisted app.

There's also Custom Apps[0] where you go through the same process but can either generate redemption codes to send people or go through the Mobile Device Management tool. These are not on the public app store.

I setup this for a company app that their employees use.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/custom-apps/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com