iOS 7 turned out to be a most successful launch, with adoption rate reaching 35% in less than 24 hours. While this is a huge success for Apple, for schools using iPads as part of their education method, it turned out that the launch of iOS 7 caused a headache.
AllThingD has heard about multiple schools complaining about iOS 7: By installing the new mobile OS, the supervision profiles they had installed on the devices were removed. This left those iPads unsupervised, IT managers without their remote-management privileges, and it also eliminated the filtering protections they had implemented.
“Apple did not realize that installing iOS 7 would remove our (and thousands of organizations across the country) safety protection measure, which now makes the iPad devices unfiltered when accessing the Internet away from school,” said a memo from the Manitou Springs (Colo.) School District 14 to parents, verified by AllThingsD. “In the short term, the district will be collecting iPad devices at the end of each day until the safety protection measure is reinstalled.”
Some, like the school administrator at Manitou were lucky enough to notice the bug in time, so they had time to find a workaround.
“When we first caught wind of the bug, I tweaked our DNS to stop iPads from checking for software updates,” a school administrator who declined to be named said. “That helped us to keep a lot of our iPads running iOS 6.1.3. We plan to maintain those settings until Apple addresses the issue.”
Speaking with AllThingsD, Apple has said that it is aware of the bug, and emphasized that a fix is coming this month, although it didn’t specify an exact date.
“Some business and education users have reported that their supervised devices have reverted to unsupervised when they upgrade to iOS 7,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told AllThingsD. “We are aware of this issue, and will have a fix this month.”
