Using the same Apple ID on all your devices is a problem
Dealing with Apple devices in the enterprise can be confusing at first. Let’s say you, the IT guy, have to manage all corporate Apple devices. An easy job with todays Mobile Device Management (MDM) software, right? You order the devices from your IT supplier or directly from Apple and evaluate an MDM solution that suits your needs. The MDM enables you to inventorize iPhone and iPads, receive information from the devices, apply policies, send actions and deploy apps to the devices and … STOP — here is the problem:
If you want to deploy apps from the Apple App Store (as opposed to enterprise apps from an Enterprise App Store) to the devices you will have to deal with Apple IDs at this point. An Apple ID is a user name which enables you to use iCloud, the iTunes Store and many other services provided by Apple.
“OK“, you might now say, “so I need an Apple ID for all the devices.” STOP — here is the point I often discuss with a lot of customers who are dealing with the same problem:
Why can’t we just use one Apple ID for all the devices?
Here is the point:
The user needs to enter the password when using his iPad or iPhone to access the Apple App store. Therefore, you need to give him that password, and what giving one account to a lot of users can do can be challenging for you as the admin — for example someone can change it and then you get to deal with the chaos.
Image what happens when the Apple ID gets blocked or locked and you have to restore or even change it. Do you really want to do that on every single device? Probably not.
Other Apple services like the iCloud and paid apps need an individual Apple ID as well. You will run into problems using one Apple ID for the deployment of apps as well as licensing issues, since multiple deployments of one app for one Apple ID is only allowed for personal use.
Last but not least there is a clause in Apples Terms and Conditions which says something like:
The limit of devices (10) that can be associated with one Apple ID in App Store is for Personal Use only. For education and enterprise use, each device/user must use a dedicated Apple ID.
(There are a lot corporate customers operating hundreds of devices with one Apple ID and so far I haven’t seen Apple complaining about it, though.)
Just in case you want to carefully read what Apples Legal information says: Here’s Apples Legal Information Portal.
Best Practices for creating multiple Apple IDs
First of all, I recommend that your users create their Apple IDs themselves. They want to use an iOS device, so they should be able to create an Apple ID even if you do not think they are capable of doing so. But I know that a lot of IT departments want to do it on their own, so here are the steps:
First thing you need to do is contact Apple and get them to white list your external IP address and email domain because once you get to about 10 account creations, Apples fraud protection kicks in and you have to wait around 3 days to be able to create more accounts. After you have contacted Apple Care (an Apple Solutions Engineer) to set this up for you, you will have about 30 days where you can create as many IDs as you want.
Secondly, you will need to create e-mail accounts if you do not have them already. I suggest using a pattern similar to these addresses:
- ipad01@yourdomain.com
- iphone02@yourdomain.com
- iphone03@yourdomain.com
- …
Thirdly, create and verify free iTunes accounts and do not attach any credit card informations (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204034).
There is no way you can create multiple Apple IDs with the help of Apple. A lot of people have asked for this and so far, all requests were refused by Apple.
Tooling
There are helpful tools which help to create Apple IDs in bulk, which even have a community, but with my OS X Yosemite I can’t get them to run (and other people seem to have the same problem, too).
If it works for you, you can improve the process even more. Here is the link to the Apple ID Automation Builder.
The tool which seems to work better is Batch AppleID Creator.
Since these projects are better described by their creators, I would like to point you to their how tos.
You CAN use one AppleID for multiple devices — in some scenarios
I know that there are still some use cases where you do not want to perform the steps described above. If you need access to free apps and enterprise apps only, you can use the same Apple ID on many devices but you have to take care of some security aspects. Particularly, if you really want to do this, do NOT add credit card or payment information to the that account and keep control of the password. Of course you need hard to guess security questions to restore passwords and a recovery e-mail address is obligatory. One of the things people often forget is to turn off the iMessage functionality (here is an article to help you fix that).
Further Links
A good source of information for managing Apple devices is enterpriseios.
