There is no direct control on the installation order of apps from managed Google Play store.

However, if you only have one app that needs to be installed first and have the device with you while initializing it, you can play a small trick to achieve that as follows:

1. Include only the critical mandatory app in the app-catalog rule for the original target device group.  Leave your device in this group initially.

2. Add a new device sub-group under the one in step 1, and a new app-catalog rule with all the other mandatory apps targeted to this sub-group.  All other profiles and rules willl be deployed to this sub-group by default due to group hierarchy inheritance.

3. After the critical app has been installed on a device,  manually drag the device icon in the web console  to the new device sub-group created in step 2 to get all remaining apps installed.

Could you please elaborate why do you think changing the app installation order can greatly speed up your device initialization?

How many mandatory apps do you need to install on your device?  Is any particular one you consider to be critical to the install that affect the overall initialization speed?

A couple apps that we install we have to initialize further once they're installed. Installing those apps first would allow us to initialize a device faster.

We install about 10 managed google play apps. Yes, installing one specific app first would be critical to speeding up the whole process.

Thanks for the solution, we'll give this a shot!