Saturday, January 29, 2022

Unlisted App Distribution

Apple (via mikeymikey, MacRumors):

Release your apps that aren’t suited for public distribution as unlisted on the App Store, discoverable only with a direct link. Unlisted apps don’t appear in any App Store categories, recommendations, charts, search results, or other listings. They can also be accessed through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. Apps for specific organizations, special events, or research studies, or apps used as employee resources or sales tools are good candidates for unlisted distribution.

[…]

You’ll need to submit a request to receive a link to your unlisted app.

Perhaps this could also be used to continue distributing and updating old versions of apps.

Ryan Jones:

Old school devs will remember the trick to doing this in ~2012.

Very useful for press access, broader testing, and testing app review ;).

See also Benjamin Ragheb (tweet).

Update (2022-02-04): Markus Müller-Simhofer:

Apple approved our request to move our “MindNode – Volume License” app to be unlisted. Approval took about 1 business day. This is a great new App Store feature. We already wanted to remove this version from sale, but this would have prevented MDM deployments.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

Why isn't this just a checkbox in Connect instead of requiring an additional submission to, and approval from, Apple?

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