iOS App Distribution

Sometimes, you want to release your app, but only to a limited set of users. This is more advanced than an Ad Hoc distribution, but not quite a full distribution. Why would you want to do this?

You may have limited audiences, such as conference attendees, research study participants, or higher education students.

You might want to allow employee owned devices access to an app that is typically managed by Apple School or Apple Business Manager

Expanding on that, you might want to deploy an app to both managed and unmanaged devices in your enterprise.

Unlisted apps are on the App Store, but only available by a direct link.

Unlisted apps don’t appear in any App Store categories, recommendations, charts, or listings. They are essentially invisible to anyone without the direct link.

To request a direct link for unlisted app distribution, your app must either already be on the store or submitted for App Review. You can add a note in your Review Notes to indicated that the app is intended for internal distribution only. You can then submit a request for unlisted app distribution via the link below, which I will also put in the episode notes.

Once the request is approved, your app distribution method will change to Unlisted App in the Pricing and Availability section of the app record.

OK, there’s one more pre-release distribution method to discuss before we swing back around to submitting to the App Store. That is TestFlight, and we’ll get to that in the next episode.