I want to become an MDM vendor to distribute our self-developed apps to our customers. Do i follow the right way?

Our company is an ERP software developer. We mostly develop web applications, and in some cases - mobile ones.

One of our professional needs is to distribute applications developed specifically for customers’ business cases. An important factor is that these applications have to be managed on a user's device, to be able to force their deletion.

App usage is limited by company user list and most of the apps are covered with SSO provided by the customer. These apps are not public (so no public login to the app is available), that’s why we don't use regular app store distribution.

Currently, we're distributing apps in a very primitive way: we give application set up file to our customer, and they distribute it inside the company themselves. In this case, every user, while installing the app, needs to grant access to an app vendor. This process is annoying, and it doesn't feel very secure from a regular user's point of view.

Can anyone tell me please if becoming an MDM vendor is the right solution for us?

It could be done the following way:

1. We develop and set up our own MDM app and MDM server. This MDM app will be uploaded to regular App Store and distributed via it (exactly like Microsoft Intune app or other MDM solutions are distributed).

2. The customer’s employees download our MDM app from App Store, log in with their personal credentials, and allow their device to be partly managed by our company. Then they become able to easily download applications developed for them.

I’ve already had several conversations with the support department, but all they did was providing a link to an Apple Support Topic about MDM, which unfortunately has no answers to my questions.

I just want to know if the described solution fits our needs before investing 300–400 hours of development into our MDM solution.

Thanks for your time,

Yakov Kolesnikov