VPP assignments vs Installs

I believe and there was a discussion about this last week or the week before about VPP and scoping. If you are using VPP assignments, it counts every device scoped to that app while some devices might not have installed. So it is completely normal to see a discrepancy between VPP assignments (because you might have 500 devices scoped to iMovie) but if only 230 actually installed it, you can see where the big discrepancy falls.

I don't think you can revoke the VPP assignment and still hope to have the app be available to install.

Probably the best example would be if you buy a bunch of tickets for a sporting event (30) but only 7 people show. You have reserved that whole block of tickets but only using 7. You can take back the tickets you don't sell but the other 23 people can't use those tickets now.

If I remove a device from the scope, shouldn't that free up a license? Particularly if the device does not have that app installed.

Yes, it should. I just tested it by removing my machine from scope on an app, XCode. Under 'Search VPP Content' we are now one lower on used licenses for XCode.

It did take a couple of minutes for the change to reflect in the license count but it definitely worked.

Before I removed the computer from scope:

After it was removed:

Hi fgant,
while searching for something else here I stumbled upon your response.
Cause I want to deploy XCode to my users too I'm curious if you have achieved it to deploy XCode to your users who haven't Apple IDs?

@simonheider you'll need to get it through a VPP account and push out as a manage Mac app, like you would an iOS app.

Okay, I've had a good look at the scope for this app I'm having trouble with. To start out, I have 322 licenses for this app.

The scope for the app includes a few mobile device groups, that make up 243 devices - this should leave me with 79 spare licenses.

There are 304 devices with the app actually installed. This should at least leave me with 18 licenses.

But when I search VPP Content, I get 322 "In Use" licenses (far larger than the available scope). If I go to that list, I get 322 Mobile devices - listed by Device Name, Type, OS and username - but I cannot show extra fields like device group to see if any devices should not be in this list.

I have manually excluded a few individual iPads from the scope of the App, and I can confirm that they have left the list of "In Use" licenses, but they seem to be instantly replaced by new devices (despite the scope being smaller than the number of licenses).

I feel like I'm doing something wrong here, but I cannot work out what it is.

@mahughe but for this the user needs to have a managed Apple ID which I have to create with the school manager? Or is it possible to distribute XCode to the machine too?