>> What's not yet clear to me, though, is why you'd choose to distribute these non-public applications through the appstore in the first place, rather than just

>> What's not yet clear to me, though, is why you'd choose to distribute these non-public applications through the appstore in the first place, rather than just make them available as direct downloads and have them "sideloaded". For most situations where you want to do this, you want the apps to download and update like any other app. At the point of distribution, you want to have some differentiation as described in my original post. As soon as the user initiates app installation, you want the App Store to do the heavy lifting for you. There is no benefit to side loading an application in many cases because you have to then have users repeat those steps again and again. With this mechanism, it's a standard App Store app so you can also deploy it via MDM or other management mechanism. I completely understand why lack of side loading is an impediment to freedom and using a device how you wish. The challenge is that there is real value for many to Apple's tools and mechanisms when they are more composable. They are likely to offer up things like this as the pressure mounts to offer real sideloading.