Which kind of certificate and provisioning profile is needed for Apple Business Custom Apps

Question

I recently found out about Apple Business and "Custom Apps", together with all new macOS Catalyst we plan to create a simple onboarding macOS app for our employees. If we've understood it correctly we can use "Custom Apps" to distribute our own binary internally, without an Apple Enterprise account (using standard Apple Developer account).

I already have a working setup for development, running both on my Macbook and iOS simulator.

But I don't know which kind of certificate and provisioning profile respectively I need to use for distribution for "Custom Apps"?

Available alternatives for Certificate 🤷‍♂️

Available alternatives for Provisioning Profiles 🤷‍♂️

Thanks!

Answer 1

Custom apps are standard App Store apps that are not generally visible on the App Store. They are only available to the organisation(s) that you nominate on the app's distribution page in App Store Connect.

Therefore, you need a "Apple Distribution" certificate and an "App Store" provisioning profile.

Once you have submitted your build and it has been reviewed by Apple, you can download it via Apple Business Manager for distribution via your MDM.