AppleID passwords for Shared iPads

bumbletech
Contributor III

One of our schools now has about 1200 iPads in carts carts with institutionally generated AppleIDs—one per device. They have one, monolithic VPP account between all iPads (shared K-2 and 1-to-1 high school), so when managed distribution came around, the institutional AppleIDs were our solution as we lost the use of configurator (joy...). I'd love to move to Configurator 2, but as far as I understand it, you can only have a VPP account tied to one MDM/Configurator.

Managed Distribution seems to work fairly well when there's a user behind the iPad, but in a shared scenario when we have devices sitting for a few days at a time, getting apps installed is spotty at best: password prompts, errors with the app store being unavailable (our schools request that the app store is of), etc.

Teachers have the passwords for the AppleIDs, but we haven't shared that information with the students as they all follow a basic structure—if you knew one password, you'd pretty much know them all. I suppose the only concern with giving the students the password for any prompts that happen would be changing the AppleID passwords (so long as they don't have access to the email accounts or the recovery information that's moot, right?) and downloading unwanted apps.

Basically, what are you guys doing to smooth over managed app distribution in these shared/non-user-owned AppleID scenarios?

5 REPLIES 5

St0rMl0rD
Contributor III

Why not distribute apps with new device-based VPP? No need for Apple IDs at all.

bumbletech
Contributor III

I haven't had a ton of luck with device-based on devices that are already using AppleIDs with VPP assignments.

adamcodega
Valued Contributor

You can tie VPP to multiple MDMs, although you'll still be limited to a finite number of licenses. Meaning, 30 copies of Pixelmator can be handed out by Two MDM servers but they share the total 30.

bumbletech
Contributor III

It's configurator 2 that's the main concern.

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smith_kyle
New Contributor III

Yeah, I was super disappointed with configurator two for the above reason. I had such high hopes....and then they were dashed almost instantly. We have ~26k licenses tied to users that I really don't want to start using device-based licenses since it's a separate UI from user-based.