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This is guest post from our partner Apperian, by Tiffany Early, Managing Editor, The MAM^® Blog

As an enterprise app developer, do you struggle with distribution of your apps for either usability testing or final delivery? How do your customers then get apps to their end users?

Security Risks with Public App Stores

The public app stores – iTunes, Google Play – just don’t work for distributing enterprise apps, since your apps can get lost in the millions of consumer apps, be confused with public versions, or be exposed to major security risks.

Headaches of Self-Hosting

Self-hosting and emailing direct download links, portals, shared drives, FTPs, etc. are difficult to maintain and increase your administrative overhead. You have to build security measures into the app before it’s compiled, and there’s no support for the ongoing application lifecycle management of onboarding, inspecting, securing, signing, and deploying mobile apps.

5 New Ways to Securely Distribute Enterprise Apps

Using a mobile application management platform for app lifecycle management and security, you onboard, sign, and wrap your apps with security, analytic, and other management policies. These policy-enabled “managed apps” are then ready to be distributed to your customers in a variety of ways, without requiring access to or control of their devices.

1. Direct Link to End-User – send a link shared in an email, launched from a QR code, or included in other user communications
2. Corporate Portals – upload apps to a corporate portal (yours or your customer’s) to maximize existing IT infrastructure and investments
3. Private App Catalogs – import and distribute your policy-enabled apps via a private app catalog you or your customer has built internally
4. MDM/EMM Suites – distribute managed apps via existing mobility tools, such as AirWatch, Blackberry Good, and IBM Maas360, enhancing the specificity of app-level controls
5. Apperian’s Enterprise App Store – use Apperian to create your own custom-branded enterprise app store to for app distribution and app lifecycle management from one administrative portal.

With a variety of secure app distribution channels at your fingertips, you can focus on developing transformative apps for your customers, not admin, security, and management.

Try Apperian’s Universal App Distribution

Appery.io and Apperian are pleased to announce a new partnership to enable you to securely distribute apps with the method that best suits both you and your customers.

These 5 universal app distribution options are available through Apperian’s mobile application management (MAM®) platform. You can enable a variety of security, management and analytic policies with an app wrapping framework that does not require code modifications or SDKs after the app is compiled.

To try universal app distribution for yourself, create a trial account, free for 30 days.

Additional Resources

• To hear more about universal app distribution, listen to this interview with Magnus Mjosund, Product Manager at Apperian, on how to chose which distribution method is best for you.
• To stay up-to-date with Apperian and mobile application management, subscribe to “The MAM^® Blog” to receive updates as they publish.
• Learn more about topics mentioned in this post: app signing, mobile app security, and enterprise app stores.