Apple iOS - "App Lock" Configuration Profile Setting (aka "kiosk mode") only works with apps installed through apple configurator

Question

Background:

Apple provides a "kiosk mode" for their iPads as part of iOS6 which locks the device into one application (even boots directly into the app too).

In order to use this, the device first has to be setup as a "Supervised" device using Apple Configurator. You then add a special entry to a configuration profile that includes your application's bundle ID.

This works great if you utilize Apple Configurator to add the new profile AND application you want to use as the kiosk app.

However, if you don't use Apple Configurator to add the profile and application (aka you use Xcode or MDM), an error will appear on the iPad:

"Guided Access app unavailable. Please contact your administrator"

It appears that it won't recognize the application unless it was specifically loaded through Configurator, which is a problem if you want the application (and device) to be managed by an MDM provider.

Has anyone been able to use the "App Lock" setting with an application installed/managed by MDM?

Answer 1

This message will appear with or without AirWatch. We are using "single app mode" or "Guided access" with AirWatch as well to lock down an inhouse application on a customer facing ipad that is deployed to our retail locations.

What I have found is that we see this "guided access app unavailable" message appear after the application you are locking the ipad into with guided access mode crashes 5 times or more. It appears this is a stop gap built in to this feature by Apple. The first 4 times an application crashes, guided access will re-launch the app automatically and you may not even realize the app has crashed. On the fifth crash, the guided access app unavailable message will appear on the screen and the app does not re-launch. Short term fix is to reboot the iPad.

The app will re-launch the app and re-enable guided access mode. If you are using AirWatch, you can reboot the iPad manually or you can remove the “single app mode” profile and then re-apply it and the app will re-launch. The long term solution is to get the bugs worked out of your app so it does not continue to crash.

Answer 2

Never mind, it worked fine after a reboot!