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Can Afaria be used to prevent application updating?

Former Member
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I have a client that is using Afaria for MDM.  They are interested in using it to limit people's ability to update certain applications until new versions of the applications have been tested and certified to work in their environment.  Can Afaria do this?  I can see this working in one of two ways, but I'd be interested in other ways as well.

  1. For apps offered through a public store, prevent the user from updating an app if the update has not yet been approved (I suspect this would adversely affect people who are trying to download the app for the first time though, since they effectively wouldn't be able to download the app until the latest version is approved).
  2. For apps offered through a private app catalogue and are also available through a public store, prevent downloading the app from the public store and control the version that is released on the private catalogue (which would be more effort to manage, but would allow a consistent mechanism for always downloading the latest approved version of an app).

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

keith_nunn
Active Participant
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Hi, Brendan.

There's nothing currently that would limit this on a version basis.  For iOS, you can disable the App Store entirely or not at all.  You can't pick and choose certain apps to block.  iOS MDM protocol API just doesn't have that level of control available.  For enterprise apps you could just be sure to not link new versions for deployment until they were tested.

For Android, the Samsung AES APIs allow blocking of specific apps but, again, not by version.  So you can prevent a device from installing/launching a specific app based on the app identifier but that would prevent all versions.  The same possibility as with iOS exists to not link the policy to end users until the new version has been tested.

Thanks,

Keith Nunn
SAP Active Global Support

Answers (2)

Answers (2)

Former Member
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Thanks Keith and Vittorio, that's very helpful.

Former Member
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Hi Brendan,

Thank you very much for your question.

There is one thing I should really mention first  which I think it is really important. Please beware that what Afaria can and can not do is governed also by the specific device used and what the end manufacture of such a device allows other third party software developers to utilize and modify. This means that the operating system of the device dictates what Afaria is allow to request and modify.  This means that for example an iOS device and a Windows Phone device are often able to provide the Afaria administrator with different functionalities mainly due to what their manufacturer. This is not only valid for Afaria but for any other product of this kind. I would strongly advice you also to contact a commercial representative in order to request further information and take advantage of  the full range of options that the SAP Afaria product can offer.  In the meantime you can also read more about what Afaria can do in the device management document for Afaria 7 SP 5 on Premise for each particular device/OS you are interested in. I think the following link should be valid, let me know if you can not access it: http://help.sap.com/Download/Multimedia/zip-afaria/SP5_Device_Management.pdf

I hope this helps

Best regards,

Vittorio.