Did a lot of research on this. Saw several opinions, few say I need a Apple Enterprise account, few say I don't.
Having a MAC server would help? Do I need to have an enterprise account to be a MDM vendor. Any pointers would be great.
I saw the technical business document provided by MDM, but it was not explaining anything about the internal implementation of the server.
Any help would be great!
To become an MDM vendor, you need:
1) An Apple Enterprise account
2) Contact Apple (https://developer.apple.com/contact/submit.php) and ask to be an MDM vendor.
They should enable you as an MDM vendor and you will have a "Other" tab in your "Certificates" section to send a Cert. Signing Request for MDM purposes.
You do need an enterprise account, but I'm not sure whether you need to specifically request to be a vendor also. You don't need a Mac server.
As for the details of your request - are you talking about signing your 'customers' certificate signing request which is a required step now in order to be a vendor or actually setting up and running an MDM service?
After research, we need to have a Enterprise Developer account from Apple, and we need to send MDM payload, from the web server, using Apple's push notification server.
Related
I need to renew my iOS Distribution certificate for my mobile app and want to hire a freelancer to do it for me.
I know, this needs to be done with the Apple Developer Account - however I do not wish to give him root access. Whats the best possible way to do it?
Appreciate any help! Thanks.
You don't have to give the hired developers a full access to your Apple Developer Account to allow them to develop an app for you and/or renew any kind of certificates in your account. Just ask the developer's email and add it in Users and Access section by assigning a proper role on the Apple Developer Website. In your case, you can assign the role of either App Manager or Developer to a hired freelancer, it depends on how much access you want to give them. You can read more about possible roles in here
I'm trying to implement a server side solution to remotely control permissions in and iOS device, on demand.
From what I've read it is possible using the MDM protocol and MDM push notifications, which allow my server to remotely change restrictions in an iOS device, for instance, or even lock the device, on demand.
I know that the iOS device must install an MDM configuration profile to be able to be remotely managed. I also know that the server must have an APNS certificate with MDM permissions.
My question is: do I have to be an MDM vendor and/or join the Apple Developer Enterprise Program in order to generate the APNS certificate with MDM permissions ?
Thanks in advance.
Yes, you need to have a company developer account registered with a DUNS number before you can be accepted into the MDM program.
You need to have Apple Developer Enterprise Program if you want implement MDM server by yourself. There is no need of Developer enterprise program to generate APNS certificate. You can generate APNS certificate from any apple id.
I don't believe you have to do anything to write your own personal MDM server except register for and receive an APNS certificate and follow the protocols.
If you want to sell your server and have it authorized by Apple, then you need to register obviously. I would certainly not buy one which wasn't.
You need an APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) certificate in order to connect to the APNS Servers to have your MDM server work. You use the certificate to validate who you are before you are allowed to send Push Notification messages. This requires an Apple Id.
Your MDM server also needs to be running on an TLS secured server and you use that certificate to sign the MDM profile you install on a device which you want to manage.
Yes, you will need Apple Developer Enterprise Account. Only Apple Account will not work. Contact Apple Support and ask them to provide you MDM Vendor rights.
In order to send MDM commands you will require Push Certificate Signed by MDM Vendor certificate.
This MDM Vendor tutorial will help you.
I'm trying to setup a basic mdm server. Until now I configured the devices using a usb cable, but now I'd like to try an OTA installation of the mdm profile. I found some instructions here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/iPhoneOTAConfiguration/iPhoneOTAConfiguration.pdf
What I would like to know is if there is some way to skip step 2, that is avoiding using SCEP during the enrollment (since this is just for testing, the idea would be to insert step two later).
The closest answer I could get was this: Enrollment Challenge to retrieve UDID from iPhone
but it isn't clear in the comments wheter the SCEP step can be avoided altogheter.
Apparently, for what I was trying to do it was enough to send out the response to the enrollment with Content-type: application/x-apple-aspen-config header set and the profile in the body of the response. The profile then just installs itself on the device, enabling mdm if configured accordingly.
The problem is that a customer cannot trace the APPLE ID used to generate the MDM APNS certificate, and it is about to expire! They need to log in to https://identity.apple.com/pushcert/ to renew it.
According to Apple, if the cert expires, all devices will have to be re-enrolled!
Is there any way around this?
There is not going to be a way around this. If they have an Enterprise account it is likely (hopefully) they kept things vanilla and the Agent's account was used to create the MDM/APNs cert.
I realize there was a question about allowing multiple servers to send Push Notifications to the same application using the same SSL Certificate, but my question is different.
Suppose that the developer of a single iOS application would like to allow multiple providers to send Push Notifications to his application, but wants to control which providers have the authority to send APNs to his App (and to be able to revoke that privilege from any one of them).
If all the providers have the same certificate, in order to block one of them from sending APNs, he has to block them all (by revoking the Push SSL Certificate, and getting a new one).
Is it possible to get from Apple multiple Push SSL Certificates for the same Application?
That would make it possible to assign a unique certificate for each provider, which would allow to block a single provider without blocking the rest.
On the Apple Provisioning Portal there doesn't seem to be a possibility to create more than one Push SSL Certificate for the same Application and the same environment (Development/Production), but I wanted to be sure whether it can't be done.
Since no one answered my question, I'll answer it myself.
The answer to that question used to be no but it seems that Apple made some changes in the provisioning portal (which is now called Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles), and now it's possible to define multiple certificates for the same application and the same environment.
Actually you can create only 2 apple push certificates for one App ID and no more.
Apple developer center does not allow me to create more then two and same experience has my friend.
I don´t see how your task can be solved now. In my opinion Apple does not want to support such products. Maybe you can do more with Enterprise Developer account but I don´t have one. So maybe anyone else can tell us if it allows to create more push certificates for on iOS application.