Shared Apple account for 1000+ employees company

[ocho]

Hello!

I work for the IT department in a +1000 employees company, and we have a lot of Apple products: iPads, Macbooks, etc, etc.

We are looking a way to keep signed in all the iPads into the same mac account, and without needing to confirm via SMS every few months due to Apple requirements.

I googled, but without success. Do you have any advice/useful link?

Thanks.

 

[chrfr]

Hello!

I work for the IT department in a +1000 employees company, and we have a lot of Apple products: iPads, Macbooks, etc, etc.

We are looking a way to keep signed in all the iPads into the same mac account, and without needing to confirm via SMS every few months due to Apple requirements.

I googled, but without success. Do you have any advice/useful link?

Thanks.

Sharing an Apple ID is ill-advised. What's the reasoning behind wanting to do it? There is no real valid reason that sharing an ID like that would ever be required.

 

[0128672]

First of all, this strikes me as an odd place to be asking that question for such a large company. You "googled", but have you talked about your company's needs with Apple and delved into the enterprise support it offers?

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/site/Overview_of_Managed_Apple_IDs_for_Business.pdf

 

[ocho]

Sharing an Apple ID is ill-advised. What's the reasoning behind wanting to do it? There is no real valid reason that sharing an ID like that would ever be required.

Thanks for your answer.

An Apple ID is required to do the initial iPad configuration, and also for the App Store, that's the reason. The iPads we own are shared by Marketing, sales, and tech support teams, so it won't stay with the same person for more than 2/3 days

 

[chrfr]

Thanks for your answer.

An Apple ID is required to do the initial iPad configuration, and also for the App Store, that's the reason. The iPads we own are shared by Marketing, sales, and tech support teams, so it won't stay with the same person for more than 2/3 days

An Apple ID is not required to set up an iOS or iPadOS device. Nonetheless, do you have some sort of device management platform (MDM)? Especially at the scale of 1000 users, this is a necessity. If you don't, this is the question you should be asking, not how to share an Apple ID across that many people.
The link to managed Apple IDs above is a good place to start and the Apple Volume Purchase Program is something which may be applicable to you: Volume Purchase Program Guide (apple.com)

 

[rpmurray]

An Apple ID is not required to set up an iOS or iPadOS device.

Not been my experience. When I tried to set up my new iPad mini 6 it kept taking me around in circles until I finally gave up and entered my Apple ID.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

There's a limit to the number of iOS devices that can be associated with a single Apple ID - among other things, it's intended to prevent this exact scenario (an organization purchasing a single "consumer" instance of an app/subscription and sharing it organization-wide).

There are all sorts of other consequences to using a single Apple ID among many users. For example, if the ability to use iCloud services is enabled, any data stored to the iCloud account would be shared/available to all other users - contacts, calendars, iCloud Drive, etc. So, at a minimum you'd likely want to setup Content & Privacy Restrictions to shutdown use of such features and prevent individual users from making changes to the account, signing out of the account and signing in with their personal accounts, etc., etc. Pretty tedious if you need to do this on a device-by-device basis. That's why Apple provides institutional device management systems. You're not going to find any sort of simple solution to bypassing the use of those systems.

 

[goMac]

Thanks for your answer.

An Apple ID is required to do the initial iPad configuration, and also for the App Store, that's the reason. The iPads we own are shared by Marketing, sales, and tech support teams, so it won't stay with the same person for more than 2/3 days

Apple doesn't allow an App Store account to extend to that many devices. It would allow you to reuse the same application licenses over 1000 devices, which is basically piracy.

You can have Apple IDs created automatically and deployed to devices from something like a Windows domain. You can look into that more here:

Enterprise - Business

Apple hardware, software, and services work together to supercharge business connection, collaboration, and creativity.

www.apple.com

Keep in mind, you will be required to follow proper, legal software licensing like acquiring your App Store app licenses for each user instead of trying to share one app purchase.

The above setup will also enable multi user logins on iPads. So your iPads can move from user to user, and they can login to their accounts on the iPad. Your iPads will have login screens.