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Manage App Store apps

With Relution, it is possible to distribute apps from the Apple App Store to devices. To do this, an app license must always be purchased – regardless of whether the app is paid for or not. An app license can either be purchased via Apps and Books (VPP in the portal) or obtained via an Apple ID signed in on the device. Depending on the use case, one or the other scenario makes more sense. For devices without an Apple ID, there is no way around an Apps and Books license. The setup of Apps and Books is described in the corresponding chapter →.

Apps purchased in Apple School / Business Manager are automatically synchronized to Relution. Apps are published in Relution with the release status Release and can be distributed to devices afterwards. Apps that should not be made available to all users can also be manually assigned to a different release status. An app can also be manually added to the Relution App Store at any time. However, Apps and Books licenses are not automatically available for these apps, and installation is only possible if users with an Apple ID are signed in on the corresponding end devices. Apps and Books licenses for these apps can be obtained at a later date.

If Apps and Books licenses are available for an app, Relution automatically assigns a license during installation – including manually added apps once the licenses have been synchronized later on. On Macs with User Enrollment, a user-based license is used for this.

Distribute apps

Apps from the App Store are normally distributed to Macs as required apps via the App compliance policy configuration.

Two device actions are available for individual devices:

  • Deploy Relution store app: offers the apps from the Relution App Store, i.e. in addition to native apps also the App Store apps created there.
  • Deploy an app from the Apple App Store: the app is searched for directly in the Apple App Store and installed without having to be created in the Relution App Store first.

Manage apps

Apps from the App Store are updated automatically by the operating system. In rare cases, however, this does not work. In this case, there are two ways to trigger an update:

  • In the app’s detail view, the affected devices are selected on the Devices with this app tab and updated via Update app. The button is disabled as soon as one of the selected devices already has the version in the Release status installed.
  • Alternatively, the action Deploy Relution store app (or Deploy an app from the Apple App Store) is executed again with the app in question on the affected devices.

In both cases, a reinstallation is triggered and the devices validate the app version with Apple’s App Store. If the available version is more recent than the installed version, the existing app is updated.