Background Information: We are batch-installing a set of apps on some Android devices (same model) - numbering their thousands.
This has been a really hectic and long process with about 30 workers covering about 4000 phones daily - all done manually.
Being a programmer, I have thought of ways to ease this process including writing Bash + Python scripts (using adb). However instead of boosting productivity, the contrary was the case: we were slowed down instead because of limited computing power.
Now I'm just thinking of taking advantage of the devices' own computing resources to install apps from within the phones albeit we still have to copy apps from the computers.
Question: Is there a way to to automate app installation as soon as they are copied to each device?
As your question suggests you can have apps installed across multiple devices, instead of doing it manually. Take a look at this link http://developer.android.com/tools/help/monkeyrunner_concepts.html.