Android tablets & Kiosk mode

[h24ijr]

We have a plan to distribute Android tablets remote sales personnel and we want to have very limited functionality in the tablet itself.

I have tested the kiosk mode (both MerakiKiosk and Samsung Knox), but there are some problems. Since we have Samsung tablets, the Samsung Knox was my first thought, but there you can only have one app opened & nothing else (I don't know why you have whitelisted/black listed apps in the profile configuration, when you only can have one app opened on screen). So then I tried the MerakiKiosk mode and was able to have the required apps installed and shown in the kiosk mode window. Now the problem is, that after installing the kiosk profile, users cannot access anything outside the kiosk window, which means they cannot even connect to different WiFi networks (not allowed and no option to allow it). So this becomes a problem when the sales stuff is traveling

Right now it seems that the only option would be to have the tablet configured without kiosk mode and restrict access to only certain allowed apps. The goal was to make it super simple for users, so that they would only see the kiosk screen and nothing else.

There are a lot more options to configure with iOS devices, but not so much for android...

[PeterJames]

@h24ijrWith both Android and iOS the App can put itself in to Kiosk / SingleApp mode via its code.

We are exploring the idea of having one app set in kiosk mode that will open other Apps accordingly. Not sure if this could help your case too. This may come with a heavy development cost.

Thank you,
Peter James

[QueBall]

You likely want AFW device owner mode.  It's kind of in the middle between the personal/work container that is default for byod use and kiosk which is completely locked to single use case.  You can restrict to a small list of apps and continue to allow access to various settings while restricting others.

I'm doing the same.  My only issue is I do not seem to have a restriction or policy to limit adding new user profiles to tablet devices that support multiple users (that I can find).  The secondary and guest users end up unmanaged/unrestricted.

You must reset to factory defaults and when the wizard gets to the step to add your google account use the keyword afw#meraki

https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Device_Enrollment/Android_Enrollment#Device_Owner_Mode

[PhilipDAth]

Have you considered getting 4G tablets - so that users ever need to change any settings?