DB centric iPhone app question

Question

The iPhone app i have an idea for deals with processing of the data stored as part of Oracle database at work. It'll be an interface to a dynamic set of data that is updated tens of thousands of time a day. Each time you look, results are likely to be different.

That being said, the company i work for does not have an enterprise appstore, which (as i understand it) means that i would have to publish my app onto the regular appstore with some kind of access key.

Q1. Is this a common practice, given no company specific app store exists?

I wonder if any of the cocoa API allows for east access and synchronization with Oracle databases.

Q2. If you know of one and can point me in the right direction, i'd be very grateful.

Is there anything else i should know when dealing with such a problem? Security is obviously a concern, the data will likely be of absolutely no interest to an outsider, but then again, we do want to be as prudent as we can be.

Please let me know

Answer 1

There are many many apps in the App store that require logins to work. All banking apps and even the Facebook app. Make sure to give Apple a test login when submitting the app, and it might help to mention in the review notes how many hundreds of people in your company are waiting to use the app. But it's up to Apple whether to approve each App store submission on a case by case basis.

Answer 2

I understand you're asking about native iOS app, but...

If you don't need to take advantage of any iPhone/iPad specific hardware, and access to the information is the most important, I would really consider spending much less time on this and building a solid mobile web site (or "web app").

If you were to build a native iOS app, you'll have to write some kind of networking layer to let the phone interface with your Oracle db anyway... and you'll still need to implement the same security practices (SSL, user accounts, etc).

Building it as a web app would remove all of your AppStore / approval concerns, while also ensuring that it'll work from any web-enabled access point (android devices, tablets, browsers, etc).

Answer 3

There's a fairly good chance that Apple will say no on the grounds that it's not useful enough for a large number of people, if it's a work project I'd really recommend looking at getting an enterprise developer license and going down that route.

Answer 4

It isn't too hard to fix the enterprise app store -- if you can afford oracle, you can afford the $300 jump in dev program level. I'd just upgrade my program.