Shared iPad

How it works

Four conditions have to be met, and all four are hard requirements. The iPad must be supervised and enrolled through Automated Device Enrollment, which in practice means it was assigned to your MDM in Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager. Each user needs a Managed Apple ID. The MDM has to enable Shared iPad in the enrollment profile, and switching a device into or out of the mode erases it. There is no way to convert a personal iPad in place.

Once enabled, iPadOS carves local storage into a fixed number of resident user partitions. You set that number, or a minimum quota per user, in the enrollment profile. Apple's floor is 32 GB of device storage, and anyone who has actually run this will tell you to buy 128 GB or more, because a partition that runs out pushes the user into a slow iCloud round trip at sign-in.

At sign-in the iPad restores that user's apps, documents, mail and settings. At sign-out it pushes changes back to iCloud and frees nothing until it needs the space. Since iPadOS 13.4, released in 2020, there is also a Temporary Session: the user taps Guest, works, signs out, and everything they created is destroyed immediately. Shared iPad itself started in education with iOS 9.3 in 2016, then opened to businesses through Apple Business Manager.

Why it matters for a fleet

The use cases are concrete. Retail staff sharing five iPads across three shifts. Hospital wards where a tablet stays with the room and not the nurse. Classrooms with a cart of 30 iPads and 90 pupils. Warehouses and factories where the device belongs to the station.

What you get is accountability without buying one tablet per head: each action is tied to a named account, and nobody inherits a colleague's open mail thread. The constraints are worth knowing up front. Only one user is signed in at a time, sign-in needs network access, the first sign-in for a user is slow, and apps must be assigned to the device rather than to individual Apple Accounts.

Honest advice: if your staff only need one or two locked-down apps and no personal data, single app mode or a kiosk setup is simpler and faster than Shared iPad.

How Appaloosa handles it

Appaloosa enrolls supervised iPads through Apple Business Manager and Automated Device Enrollment, assigns apps per device group, applies restrictions and compliance rules, and locks tablets into kiosk mode when a station only needs a fixed set of apps. Many retail and field fleets land on kiosk plus selective wipe rather than per-user sessions, and the options are set out on the iOS MDM page.