When Apple confirmed it had acquired Fleetsmith , a mobile device management vendor, on Wednesday, it seemed like a straightforward purchase, but Fleetsmith customers quickly learned a key piece of functionality had stopped working — and many weren’t happy about it. Apple systems administrators began complaining on social media on the morning of the acquisition announcement that the company was no longer allowing them to connect to third-party applications. “Primarily Fleetsmith maintained a third-party app catalog, so you could deploy things like Chrome or Zoom to your Macs, and Fleetsmith would maintain security updates for those apps. This was the main reason we purchased Fleetsmith,” a Fleetsmith customer told TechCrunch. The customer added that the company described this functionality as a major feature in a company blog post : Fleetsmith handles this all for you automatically. Once the version is enforced, it is downloaded and queued for install immediately across ...