Comments on: Why App distribution policy could be bad for iPad

By: Douglas Gintz

Douglas Gintz — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:34:10 +0000

Informative article. Struggling with the same thing myself. Throw into the mix the variety of smart devices & platforms that need to be deployed to and its hard to see a clear strategy. Still looking at frameworks like Sencha and possibly leaving apps browser-based when possible. This approach too has drawbacks, and is definitely not as sexy. But then again, let’s not forget that part of the Web 2.0 revolution was an effort to move off individual desktops w/ their own environmental restrictions, and to a single, easily maintainable, source. Feels like we’re heading in the wrong direction at the moment for the benefit of the the device makers looking at apps as a way to add value. It’ll will be interesting to see what happens over the next 12 months.

By: Mike Van Alstine

Mike Van Alstine — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:01:14 +0000

You know,

I really want to like Apple, I do. But with Monopolistic polices that make it impossible to practically distribute applications to small-medium sized niche businesses, they will keep losing the business clients. This is one case where Apple needs to take a lesson from Microsoft, let everyone distribute software that they write for your platform freely.

By: Andrew Betlehem

Andrew Betlehem — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:09:14 +0000

I totally agree. I’ve been looking into ways to distribute custom apps to potential customers and as you say, there really isn’t a nice way to do it.
We’ll have to use Adhoc distribution, and just keep adding new Apple Developer accounts. Not sure if there’s a limit to how many developer accounts you can have though.

It really means that you can’t use iPhone/iPads to develop small scale apps for specific clients very easily. So compared to writing Java or VB apps, it’s really hard to distribute them.

Maybe, we’ll just have to employ 490 extra staff to get our enterprise licence.

By: Keneth Scarfi

Keneth Scarfi — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:49:25 +0000

Hey great post! I enjoyed that.

By: dermdaly

dermdaly — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:57:00 +0000

Hi Ian,
thanks for your comment. Like I mentioned, none of these are insurmountable. I do believe that to the uninitiated (i.e. business people rather than developers), it will appear to be unreasonable. This is the challenge to us.

By: Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:45:33 +0000

If each ad hoc end user had their own Apple Developer account for $99, would that give them 100 devices ID slots to use each year? The developer could manage it for them. So restaurant with 10 iPads could use ad hoc distribution for theirs. If the developer worked with another restaurant they could have their own account for their device slots etc. I think some devs we know do this now.

Ian