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Android Upgrades to Android 13 with custom APN configurations

ÓS
Ómar Sigurðsson
Edico

Hi all,

We, as a partner, are facing the challenge of remotely upgrading Android 10 and 11 devices to Android 13.

We have been following this two articles to upgrade devices with Android 10, and 11 to Android 13:

https://supportcommunity.zebra.com/s/article/000027787?language=en_USc
https://techdocs.zebra.com/lifeguard/a13/#migrationprocedure

We have successfully been able to upgrade devices from Android 10 and Android 11 to Android 13, however we are facing a challenge due to devices that are configured on custom APN network, those devices that we have upgraded to Android 13 will load the default APN settings which are incorrect, and the device will not connect after upgrade because it will not have internet access.

So we would like to ask here if anyone would have a solution for devices that are on custom APN (4G/5G) networks and are without Wi-Fi how to reload, or reconfigure the APN network in the process of upgrading it?

Any ideas would be great on that matter. 

Custom APN OS upgrade Upgrade Android 13 android apn zebra
10 months ago
SOTI MobiControl
ANSWERS
B
Benjamin
10 months ago

Perhaps you can activate an 'Out of Contact' configuration on the device before the A13 migration that would execute a script containing a MX config with the appropriate APN configuration.

Post-migration to A13, as the device will be unable to connect to the DS, the 'Out of Contact' configuration will be triggered automatically, applying the MX configuration to resolve the APN issue.

MB
Marcus Breitenthaler
10 months ago

Hi,

have you tried to set the APN Configuration into the Persist Storage with StageNow on the Device ?

My plan to Migrate to A13 or A14 when they have fixed the Problem when you migrate without the "migration Path".

I would like to upgrade to A13 or A14 directly that the device is performin an Enterprice reset and take the configuration from the perist partition and get the rest of the configuration again from MobiControl.

Has the effect that the Downtime is very slow from the Device.

MD
Matt Dermody Diamond Contributor
10 months ago

This is the correct route. Take any settings that you need persistently applied like the WiFi SSID and/or APN settings and reapply them to the A11 devices marking them as persistent using StageNow generated XML applied by SOTI. If you make the configurations persistent prior to the upgrade then they will survive the Enterprise Reset caused by the upgrade.

Note also you only want to upgrade to A13-29 or lower currently. The higher versions starting with A13-32 have broken the persistency of the SOTI agent during the upgrade so you'd be forced to re-enroll if you upgraded to too high of a A13 version.

Process:
- Reapply any mandatory settings for initial network connectivity (eg. NTP, Time Zone, Mac Randomization disablement, APN settings, WiFi SSID authentication, etc.) as persistent settings via StageNow generated XML applied via SOTI
- Upgrade to A13-29

A
ATMOD@SOTI
10 months ago

Hello Ómar Sigurðsson,

Thank you for your post on SOTI Pulse. Benjamin, Marcus Breitenthaler and Matt Dermody thank you for responding to the post. 

In order to reconfigure the APN network in android devices when upgrading it from 11 to 13. Either we can reassign the same profile after the upgrade or we can create a new APN profile with same specification then push to the device right after the upgrade.

Thank You.

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