If it only did what it says it will do...

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!

CPOA_California about Apple Configurator