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windows-phone-8.1windows-dev-center

Windows Phone private application deployment

I'm developing a Windows Phone application for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 phones. The application is for internal usage only and is communicating with our system. It needs to be private so I don't want to upload it to the Store. I tried uploading it as a hidden app so that only people with link would be able to download it, but Microsoft rejected my submission since I did not provide a test account to our production server or app screenshots. I can provide them with screenshots, but I cannot give them credentials to the system.

I'm having a hard time understanding a thought process behind deploying such an application. We have around 30 employees so I think creating Company Hub for one app is a total overkill, so is using Intune.

This is super small application, but fortunately my employers are willing to spend $99 on company dev account and $299 on the certificate but what next? I tried just uploading a .appx file on http server as a test and trying to install it by navigating the phone to the URL but it saw it as a zip file and wants to extract it instead of installing.

Microsoft documentation is split among many pages, and more often than not they are 404 - not found.

My question is: when I'll finally obtain a company dev account and a certificate how can I deploy my signed application? Any help or point to good tutorial would be much appreciated.

Solution

  • We are in a similar boat. We have an app that is used internally and didn't want to go down the Company Hub route. We were going to look into MDM but have yet to get round to it as this solution currently works for us.

    The below will make more sense when you come to submitting your app through your developer account.

    What we did was set the Distribution and visibility (found under Pricing and distribution) to:

    Hide this app and make it available only to the people you specify below, who can download this app on Windows Phone 8.x devices. A promotional code may be used to download this app on Windows 10 devices. Learn more

    We created email Outlook addresses for those that wanted to use the app. These are just blank email addresses and aren't actually used other than a way of allowing the app to be downloaded by them:

    enter image description here

    Note that you can only have three devices to one email account. That means you will need to create 10 email addresses for 30 devices if you want to use generic email addresses, otherwise you should be able to use the employee's email address. The device only needs it to verify the download.

    I believe this is what is used for apps that are in BETA mode however it works for internal apps too and it was suggested by Microsoft themselves when I was trying to figure out a way to do this myself last year. It was a phone call so can't actually show proof of that.

    Once you have submitted the app you have to wait a period of time, usually 24 hours, before you can download the app.

    Within the App overview at the bottom you will find a section headed App management. Under here you will find your App identity:

    enter image description here

    Click View app identity details to find the URL. This is the URL of your app. It looks something like https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/xxxxxxxxx

    I use TinyURL to make the URL a little shorter but that's personal preference.

    You can the browse to that URL on the device and it will open the store for you to download the app.

    I don't believe this is a documented way of doing things but it's worked for us over the last year and once setup is very simple.