Custom Apps

In olden times, app creators from time to time ran into problems with the 4.3 Spam in rule the Apple App Store Review Guidelines

The solution to this problem these days is having something called a Custom App.

Overview

Container apps

You can’t bypass it anymore. Apple will simply not allow these type of Apps on the public App Store anymore, since they have a few solutions for it now.

Apple has released what they call “Custom Apps”. The purpose is to allow you to publish multiple similar apps for different customers who want a customized version of that app. These apps won’t go to the app store, you can instead distribute them like this:

Installed directly to the customer’s device through a simple link << Using Apple Business Manager it’s quite a painless process, I can show you the steps.

Through “Unlisted Apps” on the App store << not publicly available. << We are under NDA for this, we cannot mention this publicly!!

Customer case Newsec Problem:

Every property had a single app
Need for a different experience per property
Need for different push notifications per property
Different app owner/management per property

Old solution:

They published a different app for every property to the App Store
Apple disallowed this

Proposal to solve the problem before “Custom Apps":

Put everything in a single app
Would solve the problem of needing to publish different apps

With Apple Custom Apps:

Every property can have a single app again
No need to solve a problem by putting multiple apps into one since Apple allows duplicate apps in Custom apps

So, the problem we were trying to solve with Container apps is no longer a problem. Apple encourages multiple copies of the same app through Custom App distribution.

We have tested it out. The apps that we build allow you to do custom publishing. We have successfully used these methods:

Unlisted Apps (NDA)
    one of our customers had their apps published through this
Apple Business Manager
    we can generate as many links as we want that any iOS device can use to automatically install/update an app
    no need for MDM server

I can show you how these work.

More details here: https://developer.apple.com/custom-apps/