We have a recurring issue with our Android 7.0 Samsung S7 phones and the Meraki MDM.
On a fresh install - either a brand new phone or if we wipe and reinstall the phone we can install the Meraki SM client, enroll the phone (Knox not AfW) and then assign a profile (in our case setting the Exchange mail config and some basic security requirements) everything works as it should.
However, as part of the initial phone setup, if we allow the Android device to first download the user's backed up data (synced via their Gmail account) from a previous device that had already had Meraki SM installed, some part of the Meraki config seems to get synced at the same time - even if we explicitly exclude the Meraki SM app as one of the applications that should not be installed during the restore.
We know this because when you do install the Meraki SM app on a restored phone, it will already have the Meraki network ID pre-populated, ready for enrolling. Under this scenario, we can still enroll the device, but once enrolled none of the assigned profiles will sync to the phone. So even though it shows up in the MDM dashboard, and can be assigned to a user, tagged, and have profiles assigned or removed, those profiles are never successfully synced to the device, making one core part of the MDM useless.
We have attempted multiple methods to resolve, but adding and removing the SM app, removing the phone administrator privileges of the app, and deleting the device from the dashboard and re-enrolling in every combination is never successful. It appears that there is some low level configuration setting that relates to the Meraki app that is still being restored by the Android Google account restore, and once on the phone it prevents any profile from being synced.
The workaround is that we have to rebuild the phone from scratch, install Meraki SM first and configure, and then use SmartSwitch to restore all other apps and data from the prior phone afterwards. Doing this restore after Meraki SM is already properly configured doesn't seem to break things in the same way the Android/Google account restore does.
But if the user loses or breaks the old phone you basically have lost the benefit of the Android/Google device backup with all the apps and settings since we can't get Meraki SM to work.
I can't believe we are the only ones to experience this issue.
I would really like to know if there was something we could modify or delete after the initial Google account device restore that would allow us to install the Meraki SM agent in a completely fresh manner so that it would function normally.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.
