Apple license management with MobileIron Core

Apple licenses allows participating organizations to purchase iOS and macOS apps and distribute these apps to their users and to multiple devices.

• Before using Apple licenses
• Apple license features
• Apple license use

Before using Apple licenses

• For information about which port to open on MobileIron Core for access to https://vpp.itunes.apple.com, see the “Changing Firewall Rules” section in the On-Premise Installation Guide for MobileIron Core and Enterprise Connector.
• If the Apple license servers are overloaded with requests, it may return a 503 Service Unavailable status to clients. This response may include a Retry-After header, which indicates the time period clients must wait before making additional requests. If Apple returns a Retry-After header for a specific Apple license account, MobileIron Core will block any actions for that Apple license account for the time period specified by the Retry-After header and will then retry appropriately.
• For devices running iOS 9 through the most recently released version as supported by MobileIron, apps can be purchased through Apple licenses in one country and assigned to devices in other countries, as long as the app is available from the Apple App Store in the countries where it is used.
• MobileIron supports B2B (Business to Business) Apple licenses globally.

Apple license features

The Apple license management feature provides the following benefits:

• Reclaim Apple licenses. Apple licenses are reclaimed in the following instances:
  • A user is removed from a group applied to an Apple License Label.
  • A device is retired.
  • The device user removes the app from the device.
  • The administrator manually reclaims individual or all licenses for a given app or account.
• Sync Apple License usage with Apple. The licenses associated with your Apple license account are not specific to your MobileIron Core; they are specific to the account in the Apple portal. Core syncs with the Apple servers once every 30 minutes to reconcile each Apple license account. The information reconciled includes:
  • Number of licenses purchased
  • Number of licenses used
  • Inventory of purchased apps

  • The user or the device to which the license is applied

    This gives the organization up-to-date visibility into app and license inventory for each Apple license account.

• Manage multiple Apple license accounts. You can manage multiple Apple license accounts on MobileIron Core. This allows you to support multiple buying centers that can purchase and distribute apps. For the same app, each license pool is segmented and managed separately.

Apple license use

Consider the following:

• Free applications consume an Apple license. MobileIron Core requests an Apple license. Because the apps are free, the MobileIron Core administrator can login to Apple’s license management website and add more licenses without cost. This is the recommended best practice from Apple.
• Converting an app from UNMANAGED to MANAGED consumes an Apple license.
• Device-based Apple-licensed apps cannot be updated via the Apple App Store. Admins should send devices an install/update message for Device-based licensed apps when desired, as described in Notifying users of new iOS and macOS apps or app updates.
• Apple licensed device-based apps are not backed up. Due to Apple's design of device-based licensed apps, when the user backs up a device, the backup does not include Apple licensed device-based apps. Therefore, if the user resets and restores the device from the backup, licensed device-based apps will not be restored to the device and will need to be re-installed by the user.
• MobileIron Core does not assign a device-based license if the app already has user-based license that was assigned by the current instance.