Disabling iPhone screenshot feature

Question

if your customer could retain the ownership of a handset, they can restrict Screen Capture feature using iPhone Configuration Utility. Make sure you don't give these phones to any one outside of this organization, otherwise you are in violation of your Enterprise legal agreement with Apple.

Since this is for an enterprise app, perhaps you could put a transparent overlay view atop everything, that in a drawRect went opaque when it detected the layer was being asked to render for a screen shot (perhaps by looking back up the stack trace?)

You might try setting debug points in every possible view and layer drawing methods, and see if anything is triggered by a screenshot.

Screen capture can be enabled/disabled for iPads/iPhones that are managed via the iPhone OS Configuration Utility. See page 33 at http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf where it says:

** Allow screen capture: When this option is turned off, users are unable to save a screenshot of the display.*

In other words, in enterprise deployments where the "customer" owns the iPads (or requires employee-owned devices to be configured by IT) screen capture can be suppressed at a device level.

It's also possible to detect if screen capture has happened and to record this (so perhaps a manager can pay a friendly visit).

It is not possible to suppress screen capture under program control. Apple prefers to exercise tight control and grudgingly yields a bit to enterprises. It doesn't yield much to developers. (How do you like being a sharecropper on Apple's plantations?)

Seriously, there are good reasons to control screen capture. In the education space, we'd like to use iPads as secure testing devices. In a proctored test environment, the proctor can make sure a student doesn't have a camera or notepapers to carry away test questions. Therefore the major remaining risk to test item security is the screen capture. If you couldn't suppress it, students could quickly snap every test question they encounter and email them to their buddies (or post them online or sell them to a test-prep company).

For random consumer iPads used under uncontrolled conditions, developers don't have this capability. Them's the breaks :-).