Glossary
Shared device
A shared device is a phone or tablet used by several people in turn, typically across shifts, rather than assigned to one employee: a handheld in a warehouse, a tablet on a hospital ward, a scanner in a store. For an IT team it means designing for handover, so each user starts clean, nobody's data lingers, and a device that walks off can be replaced without a reconfiguration.
How it works
Each platform offers its own way to make a device belong to a role rather than a person.
On Android, the shared device is a dedicated device in Android Enterprise: fully managed, locked to one app or a set of apps in kiosk mode, with no personal Google account. Android also supports ephemeral users on fully managed devices, where a secondary user is created at login and deleted at logout. Most fleets skip that and rely on the apps themselves to handle login, with the MDM keeping the device identical between shifts.
On iPadOS, Apple built Shared iPad, first for schools in 2016 and for business with iPadOS 13.4 in 2020: users sign in with a Managed Apple Account, get their own space cached on the device, and sign out at the end of the shift. It needs an ADE-enrolled, supervised iPad and works best with federated accounts. iPhones have no equivalent, so a shared iPhone is a supervised device in single-app or kiosk configuration where the app manages the user.
Windows has shared PC mode, a CSP that creates and cleans up local accounts automatically. Rugged Android from Zebra or Honeywell adds a scanner-friendly launcher on top, pushed through OEMConfig.
Whichever route, the constants are the same: company-owned, enrolled at first boot through zero-touch, Knox Mobile Enrollment or ADE, locked to its job, and identical to its siblings so a spare from the drawer replaces a broken one in minutes.
Why it matters for a fleet
Shared devices are where the fleet gets used hardest and managed least. They drop, they get lent, they end up in a locker with a dead battery. A device tied to a person is at least someone's responsibility; a pooled device is nobody's.
The handover is the risk. A nurse who stays logged into the patient app, a driver whose delivery history stays visible to the next shift, a browser with yesterday's session cookies: each is a data protection issue under GDPR and a clean-up job for support.
Pools also change the economics. Twenty tablets for forty staff on two shifts, plus two spares, is cheaper than forty tablets, but only if replacement is trivial. That means no per-device setup and no data that lives only on the handset.
How Appaloosa handles it
Appaloosa treats shared devices as company-managed hardware tied to a role: enrolled at first boot, locked to the apps of the job through kiosk mode, configured per group so every unit in the pool is identical, with managed app configuration carrying the site or warehouse settings. A lost or broken unit is wiped remotely and a spare enrolled in its place from the same profile. The pooled-device use cases are described on the shared devices page.
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