Earlier, Apple revoked Facebook’s iOS enterprise developer certificate for violating its Terms of Service, and Apple is now giving the same treatment to Google.
Apple has shut down Google’s internal iOS apps for doing the exact same thing Facebook was doing—distributing enterprise apps outside of the company.
Google and Facebook had both built data-sucking “research” apps on Apple’s enterprise app program and both companies were caught distributing these apps to research participants outside the company. Facebook’s app program was public first and was banned by Apple, with the company reiterating that “Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked.”
Google’s program was discovered later in the day, and while Google apologised and disabled the app, Apple quickly also revoked their Enterprise Developer Certificate.
It’s a major deal to have your enterprise app certificate revoked, since it powers a company’s internal-only iOS apps as well as beta apps that many employees are running. A blocked certificate doesn’t just mean you can’t update the app—the entire app stops working.
Google probably has a higher distribution of Android devices than most companies, but having a good chunk of your employees’ smartphones go down, in addition to having iOS app testing halted, sounds pretty bad for productivity.
Google has issued the following statement,
“We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon.”
Shortly after, Apple issued the following statement,
“We are working together with Google to help them reinstate their enterprise certificates very quickly.”
