how the heck did you end up with that many

Not the PP, but for instance, I get everything from the people in my town; every laptop, phone, tablet that they bought a newer substitute for. I have a museum for 60-90’s systems and I never found modern (after 2000) that interesting, however, now I have 100s of those too including many iPads.

my guess is they make iPad apps

me too but four zero? imagine the rats nest of chargers lol

Not the same game, but I used to work as an Android dev for an imaging company. We had to physically test our apps in meatspace with the real device camera and we had to support hundreds of devices.

I had hundreds of Android devices hooked to a dozen or so dev machines in a test farm. A test script would run. The active device’s screen would turn green. Then a QA engineer would have to physically scan a bunch of different things. Then the next active device would turn green and they’d do it again. And again. And again. I probably could have automated more with a moving conveyor belt and a custom lighting system, but I would’ve put a lot of QA people out of work…

This was during the “bridge” period between android.hardware.camera and android.hardware.camera2, so I had to write a wrapper library bridging the two APIs. About half of our users were on the old API, half on the new. It was a mess. There was no CameraX provided by Google at the time.

Obviously Android has way more device diversity, but I can easily see 40 iPads getting accumulated by even a small iOS shop that’s taking their user experience seriously. The company that I worked for was actually quite small, yet we amassed dozens of iDevices and hundreds of Android devices. The CTO would require every camera crash to be fixed, even if it were on a random developing market junk phone. We had so many single-device workaround in the camera wrapper lib it was insane…

ewaste recycling

Are any of them still viable for iOS development?

No. Apps are limited to newer iOS versions, which are limited to newer hardware.