Support Tip: Enabling kiosk mode on Android and iOS devices
Published Mar 29 2019 10:30 AM 89.4K Views
Microsoft

Hi everyone, today we have another post from Intune Support Engineer Saurabh Sarkar. In this article, Saurabh talks about kiosk mode and the different options available for the Android and iOS platforms, so if you’re thinking about implementing kiosk mode in your environment then you’ll definitely want to give this a quick read.

 

=====

 

Recently I’ve had a few questions about setting up corporate-owned, kiosk-style devices so I thought this would be a good opportunity to go through some of the details of this scenario and show a couple examples of how to set this up on Android and on iOS.

 

Devices running in kiosk mode are used for a specific purpose, such as digital signage, ticket printing or inventory management, and are traditionally company owned and not associated with any user. These devices can be configured to run multiple applications in kiosk mode (available only for Android KNOX and Android Enterprise devices) or a single app which is available for Android as well as supervised iOS devices. Below is a brief example of each.

 

Android KNOX Devices

  1. From the Intune portal, go to Device Configuration and create a new Device Restriction profile.
  2. In your profile, make sure the platform is set to Android and the profile type is set to Device Restrictions.
  3. Under Kiosk settings, add the apps you want to run in kiosk mode. These can be by package name, by URL or by choosing a store app. You can choose a single app, or you can choose multiple apps in the profile thus rendering the experience of multi-app kiosk mode:

kioskjca.png

 

Android Enterprise Devices

  1. From the Intune portal, go to Device Configuration and create a new Device Restriction profile.
  2. In your profile, make sure the platform is set to Android enterprise and the profile type is set to Device Owner Only – Device Restrictions.
  3. Under Dedicated Devices, select Single App or Multi-app, then specify the apps you want to use as appropriate.

kioskjcb-mabutcedit.png

Note that for multi-app dedicated devices, the Managed Home Screen app from Google Play must be added as a client app in Intune, and it must be assigned to the device group created for your dedicated devices. The Managed Home Screen app isn't required to be in our Device Restriction profile enabling kiosk mode, it just needs to be added as a client app. When the Managed Home Screen app is added as a client app, any other apps are shown as icons on the Managed Home Screen app. For more information see the documentation on Device Restriction profiles here.

 

iOS Devices

Kiosk mode on iOS differs from the Android platform in that only single app kiosk mode is available and it requires that devices be supervised. Supervised mode can be enabled by Apple Configurator (which requires a reset of the device) or during Intune enrollment via DEP. More details on this can be found in our documentation here. The steps to create a kiosk mode profile are below.

  1. From the Intune portal, go to Device Configuration and create a new Device Restriction profile.
  2. In your profile, make sure the platform is set to iOS and the profile type is set to Device Restrictions.
  3. Under Kiosk settings, choose Managed App, Store App or Built-in App, then choose the app you want to use. Note that we can only choose one application in the profile.

kioskjc1.png

 

Alternative Options for iOS Devices

If the requirement is to run multiple applications on a DEP iOS device in kiosk mode, pushing a kiosk profile would not suffice as it only provides the option of choosing one application. While only single app kiosk mode is currently supported for iOS devices, you can achieve similar functionality by implementing the following:

  1. Assign the desired apps to the device group from Intune the conventional way. (Client Apps -> Add App).
  2. Assign a Device Restriction profile and select "Show or Hide apps" as illustrated below. In the ‘Visible Apps’ section you can select multiple apps that will be visible to the user while everything else remains hidden.

kioskjc2.png

In this scenario, the device would only have the two applications visible and others such as the built-in apps Contacts/Camera/Appstore will be hidden from the user, giving you an experience similar to that of multi-app kiosk mode. Just be aware that as with single app kiosk mode for iOS, this setting is only available for supervised devices enrolled in Intune using DEP.

 

Saurabh Sarkar

Intune Support Engineer

41 Comments
Version history
Last update:
‎Jun 27 2019 08:19 AM
Updated by: