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I am trying to determine what the best method for distribution of our Xamarin iOS app will be for non app store distribution and am having a real hard time with this.

What we are trying to accomplish is the following:

We want to distribute our app to a select audience of anywhere from 10 to 500 devices. We do not want this app publicly available on the app store. We do not want to have to re-provision every time we want to add a new device. Ideally, we would just invite a new user via email or url and they go through a simple process to download the app. We do not want to use B2B because it requires each user to go through a DUNNS application and a bunch of red tape.

  • Crashlytics seems like a good option, but there is no support for Xamarin.
  • TestFlight, from what I've read, limits the use of the app to 30 days before the app just stops working.
  • HockeyApp requires you to re-provision and re-build each time you add a new device and also I believe you are limited to using only 100 devices
  • Im not sure if HockeyApp supports enterprise deployment, but the devices are not internal to our company, so I don't know if this is really the correct way to do it anyway.

Any advice here?

pjs
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Jesse
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  • Any of the solutions above are limited to to a 100 devices if you are using an AdHoc profile. Also the profile will expire at some point. You can opt to user an enterprise account but this will only allow distribution to employees of the company how owns the enterprise account. Hockeykit can be used to host you own page and allow installation. But be aware the SSL is required for this. So there is no solution for you requirements, what you want is not possible. – rckoenes Oct 08 '15 at 15:28
  • We do have the enterprise option, but isn't using that limiting the app to only working for 30 days anyway? Or is that just through TestFlight? – Jesse Oct 08 '15 at 15:35
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    Testflight is now 60 days for 1000 users, all 3rd party with Ad-Hoc limited to 100 devices per device type (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV), enterprise is possible with anything but legally limited to devices owned by your company. Ad-Hoc and Enterprise provisioned apps will run until the certificate is valid. – Kerni Oct 08 '15 at 16:15
  • If you can live with the 100 device limit for AdHoc builds, installrapp.com will give you the functionality you want by provisioning on the fly. – Jeff Bonnes Oct 08 '15 at 19:07

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We have an Apple Enterprise distribution profile. Each app gets signed with this, then the device list does not have to be maintained. Apple App distribution guide

Users may then install the apps over the air from an HTTPS web server. This Stack overflow thread is a good starting point. Enterprise App Update Distribution on iOS 8

Essentially, you place your ipa, a related plist on the web server. Then link to the plist from the iOS device.

Reporting is another matter. It is not too difficult to get started with Xamarin Insights as a reporting tool. I had used Crashlytics, until Xamarin cut easy plugin support. I then switched to Xamarin Insights. However, Xamarin recently completed the Insights beta, and now there is a charge model in place, and the price is not insignificant. I would like to use Crashlytics again, which is actually how I found this thread.

Community
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Ben Butzer
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