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Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

Well yeah, the idea is that if you have ABM, you have an MDM you can use to purchase licenses for them and install the apps with the MDM.

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It can be done that way, but it is definitely not the norm. Businesses will generally “purchase” (many for €0) apps in ABM that are to be used for business purposes and push those to devices, the user can then use an Apple ID to download any other apps they want for personal use.

If they’re using Managed Apple IDs they will have no access at all to the app store and won’t be able to download their own apps anymore. IT department will have to buy and assign any apps that anyone needs, even the $0 ones that only 1 person needs.

Yep. Truly horrid policy. Where I work our issued iPhones suck to use without App Store access; no Bitwarden was the killer for me personally. Everyone I checked with uses their personal email/Apple ID instead of the MAID, and there's a sword over your head if you ever accidently copy/paste something from internal emails to something like Notes which has iCloud sync (we're semi serious about leaker). Absolute failure of an MDM setup by Apple.

MDM can restrict pasteboard from managed apps to non-managed apps, as well as allowing iCloud sign-ins but restricting which iCloud services are allowed.

It's an absolute failure of the MDM server administrator for allowing such things, not on Apple.

If my employer did that to me, I would seriously consider sueing them.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I haven’t. Did have issued laptops that were company managed but I basically didn’t use and, in any case, I like many others reinstalled a clean operating system image and did my own support.

At most decent sized companies with a cyber security and network admin team, this is probably the fastest way to get disconnected from the internal corporate network with no way to reconnect.

I always seem to end up with local admin at the bigger places I've been at because I'm so annoying with onboarding and requesting access to download development tools.

This was a larger company and they did not care so long as you followed policies like turning on encryption. Companies do differ.

You could do that in our place but you'd lose access to everything due to not being in compliance.

In a small shop that might work but not in an enterprise with ISO norms and security certifications to meet.

I was talking about domain capture. If you own my apple ID just because I used the company email to register it, I will definitely consider sueing you.

Just on a personal note, tying your personal devices to your work email account is a very silly thing to do. Even if it's your company you could be locked out of your company email account at any time (HR grievance, SEC investigation, hostile takeover...) Losing access to your devices and not being able to access things like reset emails at the same time would not be fun.

Sue for what? Do you think you own the company email address?

This was a big pain in the ass for me to figure out. I ended up using the free version of Mosyle and hiring someone on Fiverr to help me figure out how to get the licenses assigned to our managed devices.

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