Modifying Android Perspective App Confguration

Ignition
1

Hi everyone,

I have a perspective project that is running on an Elo Backpack running Android 10. It cannot use the perspective workstation, because it is not supported on Android OS, so the project is being accessed by the Perspective Mobile application. The device does not support other OS's, so I can't put Linux on it. It is (now) a user requirement to not allow operators to be able to navigate away from the project. I am hoping to take advantage of the Managed Configurations outlined here in the user manual, specifically all keys under auto_launch. I have the .apk downloaded and decompiled in Android Studio, but I could use some help with where to go from here to add the keys and recompile the .apk.
Thanks,

Stuart

Edited for more detail.

2

I'm not sure about decompiling the apk, modifying the keys, and then recompiling. I think this is intended to be used with an Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) solution. We use CipherLab RS35 devices with their ReMoCloud EMM solution to do this. It works well.

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3

Let me see if I understand the situation:

There is a Perspective project that is running on the Ignition Gateway. It is publishing a web site.
There is an Elo Backpack running Android 10 and ~a browser (likely Chrome)~ the Perspective Mobile app that shows the web site to the user.

For [reasons] the ~Perspective Client (a locked down browser that was designed to own the device UI, automatically start, and prevent the user from navigating away from the Perspective web site) is not an option.~

The Perspective Workstation is a desktop app and this is a mobile OS, requiring the mobile app.

They want you to lock down the device and the ~COTS browser~ Perspective Mobile app so that the user is only allowed to view the Perspective web site

Is that correct?

(Edited based on clarification)

4

No, this is about the Perspective Mobile app. This is the analog to Perspective Workstation, but for Mobile operating systems.

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5

Ah, thanks. More reading....

6

This is what I was concerned about. There are some EMMs that offer a free trial. Would I be able to use the EMM to create my configuration, push it to my devices and call it a day, or are those configurations dependent on the EMM to run?

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I haven't tried that, so I can't say whether it would work or not. The EMM maintains a device configuration on each device, so it's very possible that it wouldn't work. Only one way to find out I guess.

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It's also worth noting that the device gets enrolled into an EMM profile, so again, very unlikely to work. I'm no expert on it though.

9

Gotcha. That sucks, but I figured it would be the case.

I'm going to recommend ditching the Elo's and using a panel PC with Linux. Good thing we found this out during commissioning and testing and not during the requirement gathering phase.

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10

Whether you can switch between applications is up to the OS, not the application. Mobile OSes, as malware delivery devices modern platforms, attempt to restrict the capabilities of applications much more rigidly than desktop OSes.

It looks like the "EloView" addon would handle this for you; the marketing fluff here mentions kiosk mode: EloView® features | Elo® Official Website

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11

I will look into this, thanks. $5/mo/device is cheap enough to be swingable

12

For anyone looking for some closure, we found an alternative solution without ditching the current hardware. The customer didn’t want to have an EMM solution to manage or pay for annually, but we did find an app called Kiosk Browser or something like that in the google play store for a one-time $10 purchase that does exactly what they want. Nova Launcher was another app we found, as well.

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