Pushing out 10 apps each to a cart of 25 iPads - apps get stuck at Waiting

[mhayden]

I have several iPad carts, and am pushing out 10-15 apps to each of them for their initial setup. I am doing this through Mobile Devices > Apps. The apps start to load, I put in the password, and then only about 10% of the devices complete successfully. On all the others there are at least 3 to 8 apps (and it is different each time) that say "Waiting" instead of "Loading." All of the other apps will install, but these never move past waiting. I tried rebooting the iPad, which works sometimes, but eventually I have to go into the App Store and stop/start the install and put the password in again. And on some devices I have to repeat this multiple times to get all the apps installed. Any thoughts? This is way too much work. I would use Configurator, but it was so flaky that it would take just as long.

[adamcodega · Accepted solution]

It sounds like a network problem. First, do you use OS X Caching Server? That can help a lot because iOS and OS X devices will download a cached copy of App Store content from a server on your local network.

Any reason to believe the iPads have less than stellar Wi-Fi where they are located?

[mhayden]

They do pop up and say "Cannot connect to iTunes Store." It's two separate carts that I'm having this problem with, though more heavily on one cart. Trouble is, even when I move them to a better location, I have to manually restart the download of every app on every iPad. There's no way that I can centrally trigger them to start working.

[davidacland]

For that type of setup we would normally use Apple configurator. It's stable for us.

Other than that it sounds like a possible network bottleneck issue as Adam said so a caching server would help. If its more urgent than that I would just use Apple Configurator.

[mhayden]

We do have a caching server. We've had lots of trouble with Configurator; partly because of the way we were dividing up paid apps and partly because it loved to crash on us. After the initial setup we're not going to be adding too many apps to these, thankfully.
I do think it's a network issue at this point.. when I've got two iPads open they run fine, but then it slows down to molasses when I get any more downloading. However, I'm wondering if there is an easy way to get them to restart their downloads. I have to manually restart every app through the App Store on each iPad.

[adamcodega]

Unfortunately I don't think you'll find an easy to way to restart those, unless you pushed to a handful of iPads at a time.

[St0rMl0rD]

I had the same experience yesterday. Pushed 5 apps onto the trolley iPads (21 units), and on some of those, it asked for the Apple ID to be entered, and on others not. About 50% of them were stuck at the "waiting..." phase. I had to remove them manually and reinstall them manually from the App Store, which was kind of a drag.

[stiermanc]

I am seeing the same problems with apps being stuck on waiting and never fully downloading. No fix other than to manually remove them and redownload the apps from the app store.