Hello I work for a company which is not itself a carrier, however we develop applications on behalf of carriers (the relationship between us and several large household name US carriers has existed for many years).
The applications that we develop typically need carrier and/or special entitlements, for example:
com.apple.CommCenter.fine-grained/public-subscriber-info
com.apple.developer.coretelephony.sim-inserted
com.apple.developer.pushkit.unrestricted-voip
com.apple.developer.usernotifications.filtering
com.apple.developer.associated-domains
Obtaining those entitlements for the carrier applications that are released to the App Store is itself not a problem as the customers apply for them and they are duly granted and applied to the applications.
However, what is a problem is working around the strict Apple development and distribution requirements and limitations, and the consequences that has given that the apps don't belong to our Apple account but the customers. Typically, a customer would provide us a developer certificate and set of provisioning profiles, but they would keep the distribution certificate and do the TestFlight/App Store release themselves. There's two limitations that come into play here, the first is that we can't distribute the app to TestFlight and secondly, we can only install the customer's apps on hardware registered with their Apple account. Given how the limitation for that is 100 in total, and these are large companies, they just don't have slots available and hence we might have a single device on which their app can run. These are very severe limitations given the complex nature of the applications and the need to have several developers/testers involved, which isn't possible.
To mitigate those limitations we have "mirror" versions of customers' apps, these are apps which are identical to the customer apps except they have bundle ids registered to our Apple account. This enables the apps to be developed by any number of developers and distributed via Testfight and hence to any number of testers. But the problem is, the functionality of the mirror apps is severely reduced due to the fact they don't have the entitlements of the customers' apps.
To get to the point of the post - I would like to know if there any potential solutions to this? For example:
- could it be possible for our mirror applications to be granted required entitlements (given the relationships we have with the customers. I'm sure the customers could vouch for us as a company and the need for this)
- could the entitlements be granted if we switched the mirror apps over to an Enterprise account (as enterprise apps can't be released to the App Store)?
- any other technical options or suggestions?
Thank you
