Repeating Android Enterprise (COPE) issues with Samsung devices

[FelixLimbacher]

For years now, we have wanted to enroll our company-owned Samsung smartphones with Google Zero Touch (COPE) and adapt our service to move away from the work profile enrollment via company portal, which is time-consuming for the user.

Since we are responsible for several thousand devices, we obviously test extensively and over a long period of time before we actually make a change to the productive service. We are mainly using the A-Series Enterprise models.

Unfortunately, for years now, we have been repeatedly encountering problems as soon as there is an OS, MDM or Samsung OneUl update. It now almost feels as if stable operation is not possible with this trio.

We've had better experiences with other device manufacturers, but unfortunately we've never had the feeling that we could run a stable productive service. It would be a nerve-wracking experience every time an update was due.

Has anyone had similar experiences, or does anyone here use the desired scenario described in a productive service?

Cheers Felix

[Moombas]

Hi Felix,

just to clarify one thing before: OS update and Samsung OneUI Update is the same as when your Samsung device gets a new OneUI, it's distributed via an OS update.

Any kind of firmwareupdate can cause trouble to MDM management (independent of which MDM or manufacturer you choose).

We highly recommend from our side to set firmwareupdates to "postpone" (even on COPE devices, but which is not possible on BYOD), so you have up to 90 days to check any new firmware released and get in contact with the MDM and/or manufacturer support to investigate it and get a fix out before the devices get updated.

But our experience is that it's extremely hard to get "informed" that a new version (includes also SPs) is released and also means a lot of work of testing the device every time from enrollment to production use cases.

The biggest differences in choosing an MDM and devices (outside of functionalitys) are:

- Support quality/speed
- Quality of provided firmware versions

Our experience was very mixed yet on several manufacturers but because of functionality we stay with our current MDM.