On 18 December 2014 at 13:56, Fraser Tweedale <frase@frase.id.au> wrote:
I'm was thinking more along lines of being about to bypass app stores or official software channels and run on your device whatever software you wish. My understanding is that it's difficult on iOS.
Yeah, they run a PKI that requires all apps to be signed with a valid developer certificate. You can bypass that by jailbreaking (which can be quite easy, depending on your software version, or totally impossible), or you can pay $100/year for a cert from apple, which they will give to anyone who pays, and comes with hosting / review on the App Store, as well a development environment if you want to release something. (but you can also use it independently to compile and run your own stuff, without uploading it to apple.) Also, you need a mac. Which is no small point and a considerable expense. I think there might be workarounds now for compiling stuff on a PC with other frameworks and then loading but I'm not sure. I'd be curious to do a comparison with schools that do run android fleets, do any students actually untick the box that lets you install from other app stores, how do they use it (eg in ways other than piracy) and how often. You could certainly use it as a cost benefit reason against iOS, if it becomes clear that it is something they will use and thus need to pay $100/cert/year for if they go iOS.. I'm don't personally know of any successful android deployments in schools yet though.. As far as Wifi, it's a PKI based system, we can create certs for our own schools using a web based tool, how we deploy them is up to us. On iPads use Apple Configurator to deploy through USB, on windows machines usually a tool that just calls powershell.