iphone - How do we publish our ios application for only our customers via our servers?

Question

We have an application which will be used only by customers nationwide and for this reason we do not want to put the application on appstore. Shortly we want to publish it on one of our servers like a zip file then the customers will connect to that server and download the application. Yesterday when I called to apple support, one of the customer represantatives said to me that this is not possible even if we choose the enterprise license. But today I found a link which it says it can be possible. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/FA_Wireless_Enterprise_App_Distribution/Introduction/Introduction.html

Now, I want to know that is there anybody had same problem in here? What are the differences between enterprise license and company license? And the most important is that how can we do what we want to do if it is possible?

Answer 1

It's not officially possible.

You could try Enterprise distribution as others have mention, though it's not designed for distribution outside your company. I'm not saying it will happen, but if Apple find you're doing it they might close your developer account. I've never heard of that happening; only you can decide whether it's an acceptible risk.

Apple would say that you should put the app in the App Store. Unless Apple would reject your app I don't see why this wouldn't work. You don't have to make it easy to find and you don't have to make it cheap.

You can limit it to your customers by requiring a log in. Many, many apps do this, from Salesforce to Skype to Twitter.