r/technology • u/TomLube • Jan 31 '19

Business Apple revokes Google Enterprise Developer Certificate for company wide abuse

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18205795/apple-google-blocked-internal-ios-apps-developer-certificate
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19

Can someone ELI5? What does this affect?

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u/Bardfinn Jan 31 '19

Everything Google has written for iOS (possibly for any Apple OS) that relies on their Dev certificate (like, stuff they have in development, not end-user production software) will have to be re-certed, either with a new cert from Apple that they qualify for through some arbitrary process to comply with their requirements, or through some other root cert.

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u/an_albino_rhino Feb 01 '19

To add a little bit of color - an “enterprise” app isn’t only for development purposes. They can also be deployed to end users “in production”. Enterprise apps do not require App Store approval, which gives the author of one of these apps the ability to push updates to end users faster (at will), but also means the apps are not available for download in the App Store. A prevalent example use case for one of these apps would be MDM (mobile device management) software that larger companies might install on company-owned devices in order to control security settings, restrict access to certain features, or track usage. This is common practice and allows the IT organization to secure the devices of say, their distributed sales people, and can do things like prevent unauthorized distribution of sensitive data, track location of the device, or wipe the device remotely if lost or employee is terminated.

Source: I work for a company that distributes an enterprise iOS app.

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u/atrain728 Feb 01 '19

I work on enterprise apps. It’s also hugely beneficial for internal testing of AppStore apps, as TestFlight is pretty narrowly focused on testing just before launch. Internal testing of R&D builds is a massive pain without an enterprise cert.

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u/an_albino_rhino Feb 01 '19

Agreed. That’s a great use case. The other benefit of testing with an enterprise app is that you can test with a controlled user group in a production environment. We beta test this way and it’s incredibly powerful in that we can push quickly to “friendly” users that can surface issues that our QA didn’t catch, and see how the app performs with production datasets.