Android Kiosk App Support?

[Chris Montgomery]

We are considering a rewrite of a service that is currently running in production as an HTML5 web app, hosted inside of SureLock, which is a native android web client that allow you to lock down an android device and turn it into an kiosk, where you can only use the app itself, and not access any other applications on the device without having a password to exit the app and return to the Android home page. What would we need to do in order to add this "lock down" control to an AppBuilder based android application?

[Kaloyan]

Hi Chris Montgomery,

I am not sure if this is a hundred percent possible within a hybrid app. However, my research find some, perhaps useful articles that you might want to check:
Disable the Back button on Android devices, also Overriding the Back button on Android devices
Sample of application that starts on device boot

I hope this helps. Please, let me know if I can be of a further assistance.

Regards,

Kaloyan
Telerik

 

 

[Chris Montgomery]

Thanks Kaloyan, those are solutions that often work within the context of a typical web client on Android, but what I need to do is control access to ALL buttons on the android, particularly the home button, access to any system menus, etc. SureFox is an android product that does this well for the web client scenario, but for us to consider moving to App Builder, we would need to have a way of locking down the tablet on application startup. Does that make sense?

[Kaloyan]

Hi again Chris,

Unfortunately, such functionality hasn't been exposed out of the box yet.

In order to achieve this within an AppBuilder application you will need to first develop a custom cordova plugin (you can also check this link from our documentation) that natively overrides all the required Android functions. Then, importing it to your project should do the trick about locking the device after the application has started.   

Please, note that custom Cordova plugins are being intensively developed lately. And probably it is just a matter of time for such to be made.

I hope this answers your question.

Regards,
Kaloyan
Telerik