Declarative device management was introduced at WWDC 2021:

Meet Declarative Device Management: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc21/10131

Declarative device management enables devices to be:

* Autonomous - Device can react to its own state changes and apply management changes without server-end prompting
* Proactive - Device asynchronously report to the server when important state changes occur.

Both these changes move work from the MDM server end to the managed device end, which puts less load on the MDM server. In turn, this means that MDM server and network resources are more focused only on essential management tasks.

Expanded scope:

As of iOS 15, declarative management was only available for user enrollments on iOS.

As of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, declarative management is available for all enrollment types:

* Automated device enrollments
* Profile-based device enrollments
* User enrollments

Declarative management is also available for Shared iPad.

On tvOS 16, declarative management is available for the following enrollment types:

* Automated device enrollments
* Profile-based device enrollments

Description of declarative management dual-channel workflow for macOS and Shared iPad runs from 5:40 through 6:12 of the session video.


Status reports:

Devices can incrementally report their subscribed status items to the MDM server. To help ensure reporting success, the device tracks successful responses from the MDM server to ensure that status updates are reliable and not missed in the event of network events or other problems preventing reception by the server.

This helps ensure that there is no need for the MDM server to continuously poll the device in order to detect device state changes.

Status reporting in iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS Ventura and tvOS 16 are being expanded to report the following:

* Passcode state
* Accounts installed by configurations (email, CalDAV, CardDAV, etc.) - supported on iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura only
* MDM-installed apps


Predicates:

Activation predicates - determines if configurations should be applied to the device
	- Can reference status items
	- Activations are re-evaluated when status items change. This will also re-evaluate any predicates

For the details of predicate implementation, please watch the session video.