I've worked on enterprise iOS apps that were also shared to some of our customers. I've always felt super paranoid about it and thought Apple would shut us down...
Seeing what's going on with Facebook and Google I guess Apple didn't pay much attention to this.
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.
> 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...
Seeing what's going on with Facebook and Google I guess Apple didn't pay much attention to this.