What is the difference between In House versus Ad Hoc distribution for Enterprise apps?

ios provisioning-profile ios-provisioning
Gruntcakes picture Gruntcakes · Feb 13, 2013 · Viewed 27.9k times · Source

I have an Apple iOS Enterprise account and am creating a distribution provisioning profile, and was surprised to see that I had to choose a distribution method of either In House or Ad Hoc.

This confused me - if I was creating a distribution profile for a non enterprise account then the choices here would be Ad Hoc or App store, this makes sense as there are different profiles for testing and for releasing. But this is for an enterprise account and I don't understand what the difference is between In House or Ad Hoc distribution methods for an Enterprise app.

Answer

Dancreek picture Dancreek · Feb 13, 2013

Ad-Hoc releases have to be provisioned to specific devices. Your account allows you to register up to 100 devices.

In-House is for distribution to any company device.

So in most cases In-House can serve all your needs. But in the event that you wanted someone who was not part of your company to test something or you wanted to restrict distribution to specific devices you could use the ad-hoc provisioning.

Update: Ad-Hoc now allows up to 100 of each type of device. ie. 100 iPhones, 100 iPads, 100 Apple TVs, etc

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