Open Radar

 
Removing developer access to the UDID will break certain apps.

We have an application Air Forms, which is an 'off the shelf' free download with in-app purchase licenses to unlock it's full feature set. The typical customer is a business who wants to develop a database solution on top of Air Forms and distribute it amongst all the iOS devices in their control.

Businesses purchase large blocks of licenses, and we require a way to efficiently license copies of the app to a large number of iOS devices automatically, without having to touch every device.

So given Apple has no viable solution for this, we were forced to create our own activation servers. Companies buy a block of licenses using in app purchase, export the UDIDs for devices under their control from their MDM software such as AirWatch, upload those UDIDs to our server, and allocate their purchased licences to those UDIDs. 

Our application automatically checks with our activation servers to see if a device is licensed (looks for it's UDID in our licensed UDID database), and unlocks it's full feature set, all without the user having to do anything, or having the device brought in to the companies IT support people to manually set up each and every one.

We designed this because there is absolutely no solution from Apple to license off the shelf apps to a company and deploy them seamlessly to a large number of devices. 

For this to work these two pieces are critical:

- A device specific identifier which is captured and can be bulk exported by MDM software. This is the UDID.
- A way to get access to that identifier in iOS.

By removing developer access to the UDID, it entirely breaks our ability to allow companies to purchase our application and easily deploy it.

The VPP is not a solution because:

1) The program is US only.
2) Companies do not retain ownership of the licences, they're essentially purchasing promo codes to give to employees. So the license ends up being owned by the employee.
3) It's painful to actually deploy using this mechanism to a large number of devices.
4) There no volume price tiering. IE purchase 5 licenses at once get them at $x each, purchase 50 licenses get them at $y each purchase 1000 and get them at $z each.