Apple Configurator App Reviews

I spent two 90-minute sessions on the phone with Apple’s Enterprise department, and we couldn’t figure this app out. We’re trying to transfer all the data from the old Configurator to the new one, and the short version is it just doesn’t work. The support department was super friendly, but we ended our second call with them telling me, “If you can still use the old Configurator, do that until we get this updated.” That was back in October and I still haven’t heard anything. Really hoping this 1-star review encourages Apple to get this sorted out...

We are trying to transition from Apple Configurator 1 to Apple Configurator 2, and it has been a nightmare. There is no place to enter codes like AC 1.0. Everytime we try to deploy even just free apps, we get an error “NSPOSIXError”. We have tried getting this to work for two weeks and are just going in circles. The documentation barely touches on transitioning. We havce given up on upgrading to iOS 9 for the time being.

So many problems with this app it’s rediculace! Then apple wonders why there stocks are falling!!!!!! Make piece of junk stuff like this and it will continue!!!! VPN… Setup an IKEv2 VPN in the profile.. Select all your options… Select the certificate… Save it… Now you need to make a change… But wait… 90% of the VPN settings don’t hold! You have to reconfigure it EVERY time!!! WHY????

From the reviews, this app seems to be a source of frustration for IT staff, however, I downloaded it to install a tvOS beta. I discovered that I could access my iOS purchased apps, installed or not, in a much easier way than before from both my Mac and iPhone. Previously on my Mac, I could sift through purchase history in iTunes by date and invoice, non-sortable, non-searchable. On my iPhone, I can access ‘purchased apps/not on device’ and get a non-sortable list by purchase date that can’t be searched. With Apple Configurator my purchase history is presented in a standard file selector window that can be sorted by app name, purchase date, release date, device type, seller, genre — and — from that window I can select apps to install. From a user’s perspective, this is much more useful than the normal ways of doing this. If I had to manage a large number of company devices, I might feel differently — but for my limited needs I find this app very useful.

The functions it touts above are nearly impossible to make work BUT WORSE the functions we need every single day have been completely removed. There is no way to make it automatically reset the iPad when you plug the iPad into the cart. Now you have to manually tell each one to reset and install what you want BUT that is not the worst part. NOW IT NEVER CORRECTLY TELLS YOU WHEN IT IS DONE. Thats right you cant tell by looking at the screen which iPads are complete. I set the Ding sound to sound when done so I would have an audible sign of when the iPad was complete being reset and unplugged it when the ding sounded - IT WAS ONLY ONE QUARTER DONE INSTALLING APPS AND MOST APPS WERE STUCK WITH THE INSTALLING GREYED OUT UNAVAILABLE ICON. This has to be the worst BETA software apple has ever released. To add insult to injury while resetting you have to wait for and answer multiple prompts for each one. Passwords, Permission to add profiles, utterly ridiculous. If you lend iPads from a cart as we do this upgrade will disable you lending program. What used to happen automatically at your point of lending will now require a full time employee to baby sit them in a back room to do a job that did not require anyone before because it happened automatically in all previous versions of configurator. I wish we could go back to 1.3 with a couple bug fixes. Every version has gotten slower since then.

What took Apple Configurator 1.x a few hours to complete now takes a full week with 2.x. Most often the process of updating apps, or installing apps just stops. The activity window stops showing anything, but the app is still busy. I often have to force quit, unplug the cart, and start over about once every hour. Installing apps from a blueprint seems to work if the blueprint has 3-8 apps. More than that and it will fail with a cryptic error message (NSPOSIXErrorDomain -1 or NSURLErrorDomain -1) that fails to tell you what app or device caused the problem which means starting all over again. I have a blueprint with 109 apps in it for a shared cart. It installed 10-15 of those apps (different numbers on different devices) and placeholders for everything else. Once the placeholder is there, you can only get the app to install if you install it manually as rerunning the blueprint just fails constantly. I was under the impression that when you installed apps it downloads the latest version, but it appears to download older versions, as once I had the 109 apps installed, 38 of them needed updates, which too failed trying to run all at once. I had to manually run update and pick 4-5 apps at a time. Rebooting the Configurator machine here at there once the activity window grids to a stop. And oh yeah, once those apps are install, none of them will run till to touch each device and enter in the Apple ID that purchased it. Doesn’t matter that you entered it about a dozen times while installing. Documentation is so poor and lacking that it may as well not even exist. Also, unable to import anything from Configurator 1.x, as that process also fails every time with no indication as to why. I assumed if it worked it would have brought over the supervision identity so AC2 could manage devices that AC1 supervised. Nope. I have to start all the carts over from scratch with AC2. Now I am thinking of going back to AC1. The only this this version succeeds at is giving it’s users headaches and wasting their time.

I use this App with your iPod touch 5g

Another bad app made by Apple. Setting the device as Supervised isn’t working!!!!

Nothing but frustration for Enterprise customers! Deploying iPads is extremely time consuming as apps won’t install more than about 10 at a time without running into an error.

Just to keep it simple this has crippled our able to do configuartions as we used to. We can no longer create backups and still have each user be abe to do their own login and passcode information when they recieve the deivce. Otherwise their are great parts to this software but it has cirppled us..

This app promises great things. It’s the ability to design a single blueprint and with the click of a button restore the iPads to a fresh version of iOS, deploy the blueprint to all iPads in a cart at once, load your apps, name the iPads in sequence, manage the iPads, apply Configuration Profiles and achieve world peace. Perhaps not that last one, but unfortunately it’s closer to achieving world peace than doing any of the other things in that list. Want to deploy a blueprint? It’s going to fail on half of the cart. Want it to name the iPads sequentially? Sure, it will in the order did you plugged them in, not in the cart’s sequence. Want to load apps? Get your VPP - which is an INCREDIBLY convoluted process, log into the website, buy the apps separately, then go to the app, tell it which ones you want to load on the iPads and then it will download them and fail to install them if you’ve told it to install more than a dozen apps at a time. It doesn’t, by the way, store those apps locally - you have to download them EVERY time, so if your internet connection isn’t a fiber connection you’ve got several hours ahead of you to put all the apps on all the iPads as they fail to complete in random orders. There’s no way to store them locally - the Deployment Program Support guy agreed that the process is untenable for a slow connection and wished me luck because there’s no other way to go about managing this many iPads. Apple, I REALLY want this to work. Right now the internet forums are full of people finding ways to work around all of the bugs in this app, finding complicated processes to get their iPads up and running DESPITE configurator, and telling their purchasers to stop buying Apple products because of how badly this management tool is broken. But it has such potential. Please update it with a way to store .ipa files locally, to reattempt failed installs from where they left off. Fix the application of blueprints, figure out how to allow it to install more than 15 apps at a time… get it to do what it says it’s going to do. Get it to work!

After installing Configurator 2.2 we cannot apply ANY Blueprints. It hangs on either “Generating Wallpaper” or on “Waiting for the device,” even though I was able to do a restore just a minute before. I’ve tried calling enterprise support 3x, and the automated system just hangs up.