Why Xavier built its own MDM servers
Xavier V1 ran on excellent open source MDM servers. Xavier V2 speaks Apple MDM, Android Enterprise and Windows OMA-DM itself. Here’s why.
Xavier is a cross-platform device management platform for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android, and Windows.
Xavier V1 supported only Apple devices and ran on open source MDM servers. These are excellent projects. Their maintainers wrote them carefully, documented them well, and gave them away for free, and that has done the Mac Admins community a tremendous service. I used them for years, learned from them, and recommend them to anyone who needs an Apple MDM server and doesn’t want to build one.
Xavier V2 doesn’t use them. It implements the Apple MDM protocol itself, along with its own Android Device Owner server and its own Windows OMA-DM server. Here’s why.
The protocols are public
Apple documents everything: commands, enrollment, Declarative Device Management, APNs, certificates, and profile delivery. Google publishes the specs for Android Enterprise, Device Policy Controller behavior, and Managed Google Play. Microsoft publishes OMA-DM. It is older and quirkier than the others, and implementing it means understanding SyncML, configuration service providers (CSPs), and enrollment through Entra ID or local authentication. None of it is easy, but none of it is secret.
One server, three protocols
The same action in each one: restart the device.
The tradeoff of building on open source
Building on open source MDM lets a company ship faster, inherit community testing and bug fixes, and focus its engineering elsewhere. The cost is that its core infrastructure is someone else’s work. If the project changes direction, slows down, or has a bug that affects customers, the company can patch locally, fork, or wait. None of those is a good position for a product whose whole value is reliable device management.
It also adds a server. An open source MDM server speaks the protocol, but it isn’t the vendor’s product. It sends command results and device check-ins out through a webhook, so vendors have to run a separate “middle man” server to receive those responses, parse them, and turn them into something their product can use. That is one more service in the chain to deploy, scale, monitor, and keep in sync with the MDM server, and one more place for things to break.
Built on open source MDM
Xavier V2
Then there’s knowledge. When something goes wrong in production, a team that wrote its own server knows which log line matters and which command is misbehaving. A team using open source has to debug through code it may never have studied, in an architecture it didn’t choose. That gap widens as the product goes deeper, into:
- protocol extensions
- custom enrollment flows
- Declarative Device Management
- certificate lifecycle
- APNs behavior
- how each OS version responds to specific commands
Where the bug actually lives
Reported problem
Those areas are where protocol expertise becomes product differentiation.
Why we paid the cost
For Xavier, device management is the product, not a layer on top of someone else’s work. Writing our own servers cost us months that open source MDM projects for each platform would have saved. We paid that cost deliberately:
- When a customer has an Apple enrollment issue, we can answer because we wrote the enrollment code.
- When Android adds a Device Owner capability, we can integrate it because we understand the whole management surface.
- When a Windows security patch changes OMA-DM behavior, we can respond because the server is ours.
Owning the protocols also means owning the roadmap. Xavier’s enterprise AI governance features (LLM access controls, MCP server integration, and cross-platform compliance reporting) extend core MDM functionality. They are easier to build and improve on code we understand completely.
Gratitude
The open source MDM projects let solo developers, small teams, and organizations do real work without rebuilding from scratch. Xavier V1 wouldn’t have existed without them.
Xavier V2 is a different product. Every layer, from the server protocol implementations to the native agents on each device, is work we did, understand, and can evolve. That’s the version of Xavier we think our customers deserve.