With a single plug of the USB cable, the iPhones spell out “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”
This may look easy…but trust us, it’s not. Behind the curtain we are restoring 9 unique images to 16 devices at once. There’s no other tool in the world that can do that. And once we set it up, we were able to repeat it over and over and over again.
It’s was getting late on New Year’s Eve when we engaged in this silliness (see below for how it was done) but imagine what you can do on a regular business day.
How We Made It
First, we created iOS backups for the eight letters we needed: HAPYNEWR, and our GroundControl gear. We did use a little “secret sauce” to get the images to display on boot…ask us nicely and we’ll tell you how.
Next, we used GroundControl to name each of the 16 iPhones “HNY [##]”. The pound symbol assigns sequential numbers to each of the devices, 01 through 16.
Next, we created 16 policies. Each one was very similar:
- If the device has the name “HNY 01” deploy payload “GroundControl Gear”
- If the device has the name “HNY 02” deploy payload “H”
- If the device has the name “HNY 03” deploy payload “A”
- If the device has the name “HNY 04” deploy payload “P”
…and so on. Then we deployed to all the phones.
PAPR ANEEYHW Y!
All the letters were scrambled and out of order! No problem, we moved the phones into the correct order, then erased the phones, assigned names again, and re-deployed.
We could shoot as many retakes as we needed without worrying that GroundControl would re-scramble the messages. That’s because GroundControl will always assign the same name to the same device, even after it is erased. A handy little feature for New Year’s Day and every day.