Afaria Guided Access Mode

[Former Member]

Hello,

We have Afaria 7 SP05 HF 13 installed.

A customer is using his devices as Kiosk devices with Guided Access Mode configured/activated by Afaria to a specific App.

That means, users can only work inside this App and cannot do other things on the iPAD's. The customer is using only supervised iPAD's (iPAD Air 2).

The problem is now, the customer needs to deactivate this mode from time to time. But we are absolutely not able to stop this Mode on the devices OTA with afaria.

If we uncheck the "enable" button inside the policy nothing happens on the device after apply policies, also if we deactivate the whole policy nothing happens. If we unlink the policy from the group, nothing happens on the device. And if we unlink the App from of the group the app disappear from the device, but we get the error "Guided access app unavailable. Please contact your administrator" on the iPad and we cannot do anything with the device.

We do not have problems with other policies, so the network and the device connection is definitely ok, Lock and other commands are working fine. We can also reproduce this error on our test environment with other apps.

This error occours on iOS 8 and iOS 9 devices

Please see the screenshots of the policy in place.

Thanks and best regards

Ernst

[tracy_barkley · Accepted solution]

Ernst,

There are a few things that need to be checked here.

1) Does the application show up in the inventory software inspector?

2) Does the guided access policy show in the hardware inventory inspector? If so does the 'app lock' item appear? 

3) You should see a removeProfile occurring when the policy is removed from the device group once an apply policy is sent

4) if that does show a remove policy in the connection log, then soft reset the device.(power off and on).  In some cases the devices may not recognize the change until a reboot has occurred.

Please let us know if these steps do not assist.

Tracy

[Former Member]

Thank you Tracy,

I repeated the process several times - I give you the results I have till now.

• I am doing the enrollment and we are waiting until all installed Apps are in the inventory.
• I am checking the  hardware inventory inspector (Payloads) - i can see the policies there, some web clips - of course no App Lock
• I am linking a policy containing only one guided access restriction (see the screenshots above) and do a apply policy.
• After some time (between 1 and 3 minutes) the guided access policy gets applied on the device and the app starts and the policy works as designed
• after a manual start of "Device Refresh" in the Schedule settings of the server configuration or even waiting for one night to pass I am checking the device inspector under hardware and payloads - and still cant see any "App Lock" section in the there. But App Lock itself still works.
• When I unlink the App Lock policy and do a Apply Policy, nothing happens at all. Event after waiting for long time. The iPad still is locked to the App.
• When I unlink the policy containing the managed, locked App, the device gets unlocked for some moments during the App is removed, and then the Error shows up "Guided access app unavailable. Please contact your administrator"

Soft reboot does not help.

Strange, isn't it? Because I know it worked some time ago.

Greetings

Ernst

[tracy_barkley]

Ernst,

That is very peculiar.   One thing does come to mind.  Do you have any defined user groups with no members in it?  We have seen an empty user group cause problems once before.

Tracy

[Former Member]

Hi Tracy,

There is no user group in that tenant configured. Only three static groups there.

No complexity at all for that customer.

Any idea?

br

Ernst

[tracy_barkley]

Nothing immediately comes to mind.  It almost looks like it cannot remove because the policy isn't reflecting it has applied. If the policy log shows that it has been applied, there should be no reason it cannot be removed. 

Question, is the incident I see around a similar issue yours?  I would recommend uploading the policy logs to the engineer working on this.

Tracy