As we approach update season, one question that comes to mind is, “Am I ready for Apple’s series of OS updates coming this fall?” Citrix Endpoint Management will be ready, with Day 1 support for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS. Our engineering team has been extensively testing on beta versions of iOS/iPadOS 14 and macOS 11 to ensure that when customers upgrade to the latest Apple OS, administrators can be confident that Citrix Endpoint Management is ready.

Back in June, Apple announced the release of iOS/iPadOS 14 and macOS 11 Big Sur, and since then, Apple has made available four developer betas for iOS, iPadOS 14, and macOS. With these updates around the corner, I have put together a few key tips and other information to keep in mind.

Validate Before You Deploy

When the new versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are publicly released, administrators should evaluate their environment before they ask users to update their OS. Here’s a recent blog post that covers deployment best practices for OS updates.

Once you fully validate the OS, make sure you get the latest updates to Citrix Endpoint Management before going live with the newest versions of Apple OS.

  • Cloud: it will be updated automatically
  • On-prem: Get the latest version on-prem server versions.
  • Get the latest version of MDX toolkit and wrap all your in-house apps
  • Get the latest version of Citrix’s productivity apps

Application Developers

Last year we announced a new Mobile Application Management (MAM) SDK to replace some MDX functionality that is not covered by the platform (Android Enterprise/iOS User Enrollment). This new SDK will enable app developers to use native languages like Objective-C/Swift to integrate their apps with the MAM SDK.

Citrix’s engineering team is working to provide iOS/iPadOS 14 support for the MAM SDK. We recommend that developers download the latest version of the SDK to ensure support for iOS/iPadOs 14 once available.

New Feature Support

In addition to Day 1 support, we also plan to provide support (available in Q4 2020 and Q1 2021) for a select feature set introduced by Apple during WWDC 2020. Some of these key features are:

  • Managed Mac Apps, which supports:
    • Removal of apps by MDM command and upon un-enrollment
    • iOS-style managed app configuration and feedback
    • Conversion of an unmanaged app to managed
  • Shared iPad for Business
  • Non-removable managed apps
  • Setup assistant skip screens
  • New Restrictions (iOS/iPadOS and macOS)
  • Disable Mac Randomization

Updates to MAC Address Randomization for Privacy

Many enterprise Wi-Fi setups rely on identification of MAC addresses to handle authentication. If your organization is whitelisting a MAC address, we recommend you disable the MAC privacy address option on Wi-Fi Policy. For more information on this update, see the following Apple documentation.

Requirements for Trusted Certificates in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS

With these updates, Apple also has new requirements for TLS server certificates. Make sure to verify that all certificates follow the Apple requirements. You can find more information in this Apple documentation. The critical thing to remember here is that Apple is reducing the maximum allowed lifetime of TLS server certificates. This change affects only server certificates issued after September 2020.

With all these updates come some really great features. I hope that this post helps to guide you in your continued journey with Apple and Citrix Endpoint Management to deliver a great Citrix Workspace experience.


For Citrix Investors

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