Forum Discussion
Solved
Can you skip network connection in Android Enterprise Edition?
Hello community,
We have Samsung XCover6 Pro Enterprise Edition sent to customer in May this year. (Android v.12)
They have started the phone and then didn't enroll it. They have just started the phone and put it on the shelf and battery has died and now they have started the phone. There are two problems:
1. They can skip to connect to the Wi-Fi
2. Even if they connect to Wi-Fi the phone doesn't get enrolled, the enrollment phase never comes up, you can just continue to setup the normally
If we remove the phone from Zero Touch Portal, hard wipe the device by connecting it to a PC and then upload it to ZTP and connect it to Wi-Fi. Then it starts with enrollment.
So I wanted to test this myself. I took the exact same model of the phone Samsung XCover6 Pro Enterprise Edition from our shelf and started it and to my surprise I COULD NOT skip network connection.
Now the only difference between the phone that I tested and the phone that we sent to the customer is that, we sent the phone to customer like 6 months ago. But my test phone purchased recently, like a month ago.
I tested this with several different Enterprise phone models and got the exact same result! COULD NOT skip network connection. I had to connect to a network before continuing with the setup.
This is exactly what I want because of the obvious reasons.
So my questions:
Isn't this policy / feature (that you MUST connect to a network) by default set to TRUE for all Android Enterprise? Or is it different based on Android version?
I think you'll need to speak to Samsung on this.
If the devices are showing correctly registered in ZT either via IMEI1 or SN & hardware details, and the config is assigned, it sounds to me like a bug in the build missing a step.
Are you buying enterprise edition models or anything outside of standard off-shelf devices from a normal retailer?
Are you able to flash/update with e-FOTA or OTA these devices to their latest builds and verify the behaviour still happens?
To my knowledge and based on actual testing, because Zero Touch relies on the device connecting to Google's servers over the internet for verification, even if the setup wizard initially opts for an offline configuration, once the device connects to the internet, the system, through Google Play Services, detects Zero Touch settings and will mandates a forced reset of the device.
Totally true.
If devices are enrolled without internet connection as a normal consumer device, as soon as the device is going online and gets detected by ZTP it will get a notification that the device will force a wipe in ~2 hours.
It could be, that this won't happen if the device is connected to a restricted network where no access to Google-Services is given (just an assumption) but to the rest of internet but never tested that.
Yes I have come to understand how ZTP and the device talk and work with each other.
Though, my question remains:
Isn't this policy / feature (that you MUST connect to a network) by default set to TRUE for all Android Enterprise? Or is it different based on Android version?
We have over 40 devices uploaded to ZTP six months ago but when started and connected to internet nothing happens. And still my question remains about the mandatory internet connection at the initial startup and set-up of the device.
Isn't this policy / feature (that you MUST connect to a network) by default set to TRUE for all Android Enterprise? Or is it different based on Android version?No, as you can use them as a COPE or BYOD if you want. Especially the BYOD won't need a network connection during enrollment.
