Pushing to iPad 1

thead9
New Contributor

Hello, I work at a high school, and we still have some old iPad 1's. Attempting to push Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to them using VPP has been unsuccessful. They appear within self service, but when you select to install them, the circle just continually spins with no apparent progress. Does anyone know of a way to successfully deploy compatible versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to iPad 1's?

5 REPLIES 5

Aziz
Valued Contributor

@thead9

Pages, Keynote and Numbers require iOS 8.0 or higher, The iPad's latest OS is 5.1.1

This won't work, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

thead9
New Contributor

@Abdiaziz

Do you know if there is a way to push a previous version of the app that would work with iOS 5.1.1? Thanks!

bpavlov
Honored Contributor

I could be wrong, but the App Store on both iOS and OS X will detect the latest version of the app that can run on your OS and download that. I forget when that feature was introduced though so it could very well be that iOS 5.1.1 will not be able to do this. However, there's one easy way to test this. If you have the iWorks apps tied to your account sign in on the iPad and see if you can download them and if so what version downloads.

jqcampbell
New Contributor II

We attempted to do this with Apple Configurator, but it is a bit of an odd process. From my experience the only way to obtain the compatible versions of these apps is to initiate the download through the App Store on a first gen iPad. It will prompt you that a different version is available for this version of iOS. Once downloaded I used the application iFunBox (http://www.i-funbox.com) to make a backup of the application. This will allow you to obtain the older version .ipa file from the device itself since you can only obtain the newest version from iTunes.

Once you have the .ipa file you can upload it into Configurator or in your case I would imagine you could upload it into Casper as an In-House app for distribution. I'm not sure of the legality of distributing in this manner, but I would assume if you have purchased the proper number of licenses for the devices you should be good they just will not be distributed as "managed apps" through VPP.

Let me know if you need further specifics.

jqcampbell
New Contributor II

FYI... A warning for anyone that may attempt this in Configurator make sure that you are only managing first gen iPads with that instance of Configurator. Mixing old with new did not work well since it will attempt to overwrite the older iOS 5 version of the apps with the new versions if you attempt to add both. You might be able to modify the app id or something of that nature inside of the .ipa file in order to prevent that, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble.