Nobody watches the budget more closely than schools. So along with the swift pace of 1:1 program- and BYOD-adoption has come a critical need to find the most practical and affordable way to deploy apps across a sea of iOS devices. 
Apple's VPP Managed Distribution program - which essentially lets schools "loan" out an app for the duration of time it's used - is responding to that need. For example, rather than buying a TapTyping license for every student, schools can push an app to a subset of devices for the single semester it's needed.
Let's step back to look at how the purchase, and use, of iOS apps has evolved to get us to where we are today.
In the beginning there was the App Store
When the App Store was first launched back in 2008, it brought some revolutionary licensing terms with it. Prior to the days of the App Store, you had to buy a copy of a license for each seat.
When Apple released the iPad in 2010, these terms followed the terms of the iPhone. If your family had six devices, you could buy one license of the app and use it on all of your devices. As the iPad extended into the education sector, something obviously had to change.
From a technical perspective, syncing hundreds of devices through iTunes doesn’t scale. From a business perspective, it’s simply not fair to developers for schools to be able to buy one copy of an app and deploy it to hundreds of devices. Developers have to eat, as well.
Volume Purchase Program (VPP) to the rescue
Apple, realizing this, announced the Volume Purchase Program. This allowed schools to buy multiple copies of apps within a single transaction (with tax exemption.) Prior to this, schools didn’t even technically have a way to buy multiple copies of an app since iTunes doesn’t allow this. Developers could also enable a quantity discount that gave purchases a 50% discount for 20+ copies.
After purchasing the licenses, you were given a spreadsheet. Seriously, you were given a spreadsheet of app codes. The problem with iTunes still remained. If you were managing the devices internally, you still had to sync with iTunes.
Then came Apple Configurator
With the announcement of the iPad 2, Apple also released Apple Configurator. This helped IT administrators manage a larger scale of devices. Apple Configurator took the spreadsheets from the VPP program and allowed you to sync quite a few iPads at once (I’ve seen 15–30 work reasonably well).
As the iPads use in education continued to grow, IT administrators needed to avoid solutions that required syncing with a cable. With smaller deployments, you can brute force solutions. With deployments of over a hundred devices, you need to automate as much as possible.
Apple again answered the call with integrating the VPP program into it’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) Protocol. This really worked well. You took your spreadsheets from the VPP system and uploaded to your MDM system. You could then push the app licenses out to your devices over the air (the user would have to accept the app and then, authenticate into the iTunes store to download). The main problem with this is that you lost those licenses forever.
This was a potentially expensive situation. Once the student accepted the license, it was their’s forever.
Enter VPP - Managed Distribution
Fast forward to 2014, when Apple once again showed us their master plan. We started with VPP, and we have now ended up with VPP-Managed Distribution (MD).
What is VPP-MD? Well, it’s just like uploading your codes into your MDM system except you don’t have to upload your codes. And now 
they aren’t permanently assigned to devices. Inside of Apple’s VPP portal, you can link your MDM, and then the codes will transfer automatically.
Apple even has a way to transfer your existing codes into VPP-MD. Let’s say that you have an expensive app that you only need for one block of students at a time. With VPP-MD, you can assign a code to a user and then revoke it later. When it’s revoked, the user has 30 days to buy the app in order to retain their data.
VPP-MD is really what we’ve wanted from the beginning. If you look at the iPads release in 2010 and see the deployment systems we have in 2015, Apple really has delivered here. If you pair VPP-MDM with the Device Enrollment Program, you’ve got a way to deploy thousands of iPads without unboxing a single one.
Have you found VPP Managed Distribution helpful? Let us know in comments or on Twitter.