The Multiseat Volume Purchasing feature, among the innovations Apple announced last June, is beginning as of October 22.
As is known, via the Volume Purchase Program, paid or free applications could be purchased, but in-app purchases could not be made. And this led to problems especially in purchasing the subscriptions that employees would use.
With an announcement it released, Apple announced that the Multiseat purchasing feature for all subscriptions has been opened in App Store Connect, and that as of October 22, Volume Purchasing can be done via Apple Business / Apple School Manager. Among the application developers who offer subscriptions, those who don’t want to make bulk sales this way will need to manually turn off this feature. There will also be a distribution model for these kinds of purchases outside the Apple Business and MDM workflow. In the same announcement, Apple addressed the coming winter months for this method, named Group Purchasing.
Let’s explain the subject through a workflow. Suppose an organization where thousands of people work uses OpenAI‘s ChatGPT as its AI tool. Companies of this size can use the Enterprise version of ChatGPT instead of purchasing ChatGPT subscriptions one by one. And for users’ logins to ChatGPT, they can use the SSO method they use corporately instead of a standard username-password. In fact, organizations that use Microsoft Intune as their MDM solution can also distribute the ChatGPT for Intune iOS application. Thus, it will be possible to separate personal ChatGPT use from corporate use. You can read the ChatGPT for Intune article we wrote earlier on this subject.
Smaller companies that aren’t at this scale — for example, startups — may prefer to use not the Enterprise version of ChatGPT but one of the Go, Plus, or Pro versions. Companies of this kind have until now been forced to do this job via individual purchases. Because ChatGPT‘s application could be downloaded free of charge via the App Store, and the packages to be purchased could be purchased from within the application. And for end users, this situation will continue to remain so.
From now on, these kinds of paid subscription purchases will be able to be made via Apple Business and distributed to users. Therefore, if you haven’t connected a payment system to Apple Business until now because you thought “All the VPP applications I distribute are free anyway,” we can say that now is the right time to do this.
You can reach Apple’s announcement on the subject at this address. If you didn’t watch it last June’s WWDC sessions, you can also watch the technical presentation named Offer Subscriptions to Groups and Organizations here.
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