Offline iOS Enterprise App Deployment and provisioning

Question

I have posted this question on SO since I think it is the most logical place to find people with a lot of experience with the iOS Enterprise program.

For my company, we are developing an in-house app. We would like to deploy this app with the minimum effort required on the user's side <1>, as it should be possible to quickly install it for incoming colleagues. Additionally, we can't always guarantee an up and running internet connection at install time <2>. The in-house app is to be downloaded on our premises from a webserver through wifi.

We are currently not enrolled in the enterprise program, as we're investigating whether or not our goals can be realized.

As for <1>, what we've found is that UDIDs are not necessary to include in the provisioning profile for enterprise deployment. What is needed, is a provisioning profile. Now, here are my first concrete questions:

• are any additional steps necessary before a provisioning profile can be installed?

• can the provisioning profile be embedded within the app as can be done for OTA betas? This would save a user the step of installing the profile.

For <2>, the following issues come to mind:

• here it states that access is needed to ax.init.itunes.apple.com and ocsp.apple.com. The former for querying the max allowable GPRS app file size. It doesn't sound relevant when your goal is to distribute over wifi, but the page says "If this site isn’t reachable, installation may fail." so it does concern me a bit. The latter one seems less severe as it is stated that "Inability to contact or get a response from the OCSP server isn’t interpreted as a revocation", which means that it should be possible to not contact this server right away.

• I'm assuming that I can use any URL scheme to point to a local server that provides the app bundle and that there are no restrictions on server configuration.

• Summarizing the two: is it possible to install an in-house app from a local server without a functioning internet connection?

Thanks for the help; it's greatly appreciated. As I have no prior experience with Enterprise deployment, it is tough to be confident that I'm not missing out on the nitty gritty details in Apple's documentation.

Answer 1

Provisioning profile can be embedded.

Your employee's devices requires internet connection when they are downloading the app, so that the device can contact Apple servers you mentioned.