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I have an Apple iOS Enterprise account and am creating a distribution provisioning profile, and was surprised to see that I had to choose a distribution method of either In House or Ad Hoc.

This confused me - if I was creating a distribution profile for a non enterprise account then the choices here would be Ad Hoc or App store, this makes sense as there are different profiles for testing and for releasing. But this is for an enterprise account and I don't understand what the difference is between In House or Ad Hoc distribution methods for an Enterprise app.

Gruntcakes
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1 Answers1

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Ad-Hoc releases have to be provisioned to specific devices. Your account allows you to register up to 100 devices.

In-House is for distribution to any company device.

So in most cases In-House can serve all your needs. But in the event that you wanted someone who was not part of your company to test something or you wanted to restrict distribution to specific devices you could use the ad-hoc provisioning.

Update: Ad-Hoc now allows up to 100 of each type of device. ie. 100 iPhones, 100 iPads, 100 Apple TVs, etc

Dancreek
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    And anyone registered for the iOS Developer program can make use of Ad Hoc distribution. Only business signed up for the iOS Enterprise program can make use of enterprise distribution. Basically they are two different ways to circulate an app outside of the App Store, with different purposes. – Snips Feb 13 '13 at 16:46
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    Thanks, I guess I'm confused with why anybody with an Enterprise account bother with Ad-hoc distribution? Why limit yourself to 100 when you have more. – Gruntcakes Feb 13 '13 at 17:07
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    What annoys me is that, in the Apple Developer website, you need to choose between an "Ad-Hoc" or "In House" profile... but then it's displayed as "iOS Distribution" or "iOS UniversalDistribution"... then when you come and Archive it and click on "Export.." you get the choices of "Ad Hoc" or "Enterprise deployment". Its no surprise I get this wrong almost every time I change my app. (And of course, if everything doesn't exactly line up, you'll get an .ipa file which starts installing on the device... then falls over with a useless "XXX cannot be installed at this time" message.) – Mike Gledhill Dec 06 '16 at 09:38
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    @Dancreek And how exactly do you differentiate a company device vs some one else's device? – rak appdev Apr 04 '17 at 20:08
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    I don't know what the exact legal requirements are. I *believe* its either a company device or a company employee using the device. So you should be able to issue apps to your employees even if they are using personal devices. Again... if you are concerned with legal correctness, you'll have to do your own research on this. – Dancreek Apr 05 '17 at 14:31
  • I know ad-hoc allows up to 100 devices. Does the "In-House" (enterprise) app distribution allow unlimited device installs? – user1685442 May 04 '22 at 03:43
  • Yes, enterprise is unlimited – Dancreek Jun 07 '22 at 01:27
  • @MikeGledhill I'm facing the same issue which you pointed out. I have an enterprise account, and when i try to create Enterprise In House distribution build via CI/CD build failed. I get this error all time Provisioning profile "Project xxxxx InHouse Prod" is not an "iOS Ad Hoc" profile. Does this mean that we cannot use In House profile itself ? Could you please help here, here is my question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72127839/unable-to-generate-ipa-through-xcodebuild-with-universal-distribution-for-enter – Madhu Jul 08 '22 at 05:52
  • [Apple states: "_Note:_ As a member of the Apple Developer Enterprise Program, you don’t have an App Store Connect account and consequently, the ability to distribute an app using TestFlight."](https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devba5e7054d) – PDK Jul 25 '22 at 12:08