If you're sharing your apps with customers for very benign purposes, I doubt they'd care. For instance, if you were giving customers access to your business's data or some sort of internal app that provides functionality that you wouldn't want to make public. That seems very reasonable, and might not even be outside the ToS (IANAL, and I haven't read them).

In both Google and Facebook's cases, they were using it to distribute apps to the public at large (i.e., users with whom they have no business relationship) simply because they couldn't get the apps into the app store to begin with because they would otherwise violate Apple's rules. So not only were they flagrantly disregarding the ToS of their enterprise certs, they were doing so in order to violate Apple's rules for app distribution. Less than great.

If anything I think the fact that this has gone under the radar for so long is a pretty good indication that Apple has no data about what apps are being run via this program. Although abuse like this will probably flare up some arguments internally over whether they should more aggressively track activity in iOS.

Mmmm, from everyone I've spoken to there, it's not something they don't pay attention to, there just hasn't been extreme violators like what Google and FB have done lately.

I mean, the program exists for a reason.

Apple can't pay attention to it though.

The whole point of enterprise certificates was to allow creation of internal apps that even Apple shouldn't know about.

> The whole point of enterprise certificates was to allow creation of internal apps that even Apple shouldn't know about.

I think most/all of the companies in the program would say it's about controlling the distribution of their apps, since putting them on the App Store would expose them to the public, and less about hiding from Apple...

I think it’s just a case that they didn’t know. Unless they get complaints or reports, it’s not necessarily going to be obvious to them.