If you have any familiarity with how OS X stores its configuration files, it would not be too much of a surprise to hear that a profile that was implemented for iOS management is also a specific flavor of XML. Instead of a central registry like you have on Windows, there's different, often granularly set files or (often sqlite3) databases with which an application or the operating environment itself is customized. However, this is not as important as the framework with which changes are enforced on the system, and so, a trip back to OS X would actually be useful, as that was what inspired much of the architecture of iOS.

Without management, changes can still be applied by touching key-value pairs in these XML files in what are called preference domains. The files themselves are referred to as property lists and carry the .plist file extension. A common binary used to interact with these .plist files at the command line is the defaults command, although system frameworks...