Hi, We have purchased an Apple developer enterprise account for our organization and shared the app download link with our employees. My question is, how to intimate our staff who already installed the app about the latest version of the app? As compared with the Apple store where their app updates/intimate automatically.
Hello musmanzpak, Thank you for asking this question on the Apple Developer Forums!
There are many ways to accomplish what you are looking to do, some including Apple tooling, but nothing out of the box that the Enterprise Developer Account provides to accomplish this.
Below are some thoughts on how to go about accomplishing this along with protecting your Enterprise Developer Account to ensure that it does not get used outside of the Terms and Conditions.
- Use an MDM Solution
The best way to accomplish what you are looking to do in my opinion would be to use an MDM solution. It will provide you with authentication and protection of company resources on top of sharing a link for employees to access the IPA file for installation (not sure if you are using OTA based off of what you have shared).
If you go down the route of MDM, I would at that point suggest also switching from Enterprise applications to Custom Apps as that will save you copious amounts of time in the long run from a management and ensure your development teams are not building technical debt.
- Use Push Notifications
A simple way to do this would be to leverage Push Notifications if they exist in the application and sending a Push Notification that says something like "New App Version! Tap to Download!" and having the notification open a URL where your OTA file is waiting to install the application. I have some of this implemented and it works well because you should be able to target users based off of their installed application version.
- Build a Custom Solution (Caution)
Another option would be to build a custom solution that "lists" internal content that can be downloaded by Employees (Read Apple Enterprise Developer Terms and Conditions). I would make sure that this is a protected site or application as while it is not against the Apple Terms and Conditions, it can be depending on how you use the technology.
However, with the above options, using Custom Apps in the long run will be the best option for your organization in my opinion as your company will not be able to leverage the latest security entitlements from Apple by using Enterprise signed applications.
Hopefully this helps and happy coding!
