Apple’s announcement yesterday about a system to sell custom B2B apps directly to business customers is particularly timely for us at Appwolf. Of late, we’ve got a number of projects to build apps to deployed within companies and to be frank, the existing options for internal deployment are a mess.

Hitherto, the only sanctioned method for a company to deploy apps amongst its employees was for the company to sign up for the Apple Developer Program. Simple enough to say but this was a real hassle in practice; the company itself had to apply and this proved challenging for some of our non-techie clients (who just wanted to have a few iPads with a custom app in their retail store). Moreover, the application process can take *forever* – one of our clients applied for the Program more than 2 months ago and the process is still not complete.

The other alternative of course it to put these apps on the app store, but in a lot of cases, companies don’t want their in-house apps accessible to all. Plus there is the ever-present problem of getting an app through app review (particularly when said app has been designed with a very narrow use case in mind).

For a time, we were seriously considering doing internal company apps on Android instead of iOS. Android app distribution is super-easy; We can just mail the app file to the client and they can install it on any Android device they liked.

However it looks like Apple has recognised the problem and is trying to resolve it. The new Custom B2B scheme lets developers create custom apps and make these available only to specific customers (apps are distributed via Apple’s infrastructure – customers are provided with a number of redemption-code based links from which the app can be downloaded). The apps still go through review but presumably/ hopefully they will be reviewed in a looser context than apps being reviewed for the app store.

Customers can access this Custom B2B scheme by just signing up for the Apple Volume Purchase Program. We’ll need to see how this sign up works in practice but on the face of it, it looks to be a lot easier than signing up for the Apple Developer Program.

The scheme is still being rolled out – currently, only US firms can sign up for the Volume Purchasing Program – but in general, this is a promising step. Fingers crossed, deploying in-house apps to companies will be a lot easier going forward.