Business to Business App off-app-store

Ionic Framework ionic-v3
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I looking at an app that would be created for a specific company, then deployed to specific people in that business. It wouldn’t live on iOS/Android stores. What is the best/easiest way to either only allow specific people to download that app, or how I would push it only to those people? They wouldn’t be very technically inclined and I wouldn’t have direct access to their phones. Can anyone give me their thoughts on the best approach? Seems like something that would be done quite a bit for business to business type apps, but I can’t find much while googling around.

thanks for any help here

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Android versions you have a fair bit of adhoc opportunity by the deployment of your binaries to a website which can be installed manually.

If you get it right you can push hot-changes using something like Microsoft Appcenter or Ionic Pro.

For iOS, that’s more tricky.
You really need to go to something like https://developer.apple.com/business/custom-apps/.

ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY
If you are not need much in the way of plugins, but is basically a data-driven app, you could get away with a PWA - which would simply require you to deploy your bundled Ionic app to a webserver somewhere on the internet.
This offers you a massive amount of freedom such as immediate software releases without app store approval etc, zero fees.
I’ve done a few in this manner and could access stuff like…
WebSQL
Offline support
Camera / Saved Photo Album
GeoLocation
That was all I needed but I know guys have done plugins for stuff like QR Code reading and the like. In the end you might find this enough for your needs.

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thanks Judge

Ya I’ve thought about the PWA route. Maybe I’ll have to look into that a bit more.

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Nay probs.

I’ve had PWA’s out in the field since around 2012, since before the term ‘PWA’ was coined (just used to call em full screen web apps) and before Ionic was even a thing. There’s been a few rough turns but when I think of all the conversations I’ve not had with Apple and the money I’ve had to pay over I’m more than happy with that decision. I know now as I have apps both in and out of the app store.

For myself I know my future endeavours with clients will be PWA based.