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Lock down the Internet - but allow Google Maps and Navigation with in Google maps

KM
Kirsty Monk
centralitycloudmigration

We have Samsung (S6 and S8) and they are all in Kiosk mode. 

The Users must not be allowed to access the internet except to use Google Maps.

If you allow the standard Google Maps app on the lockdown screen they can use it fine but they can break out to the internet via website links in the map location despite disallowing this in Application Run Control. An example I will use is YouTube.

So you allow Google Maps (App) on the lockscreen, user searches for something like 'Costa', a list of Costa sites come up with a link to their website. They click the website link which gives them an address bar to free type whatever they please, In this case YouTube. YouTube is Blacklisted in Application Run Control.

I have found a way around this by adding the following to the lockdown screen Surf://www.google.co.uk/maps and then in Soti Apps > Surf Settings I have whitelisted maps.google.co.ukweb. This works perfectly to find locations and directions and does not allow the user to access anything on the internet apart from Google Maps. However they can not use the navigate button which would give them walking directions for example. It says Access Restricted then brings them back to Google Maps.

So close to a solution - maybe I just need to whitelist something else as well?

surf soti-surf sotisurf maps google-maps
6 years ago
Android
ANSWERS
R
RKMOD@SOTI
6 years ago

Hi Kirsty

Regarding the Navigate button access, it appears to be a default behavior of Google Maps, if you try accessing the Navigate button in maps through a web browser, it will ask you to open the Google Maps application instead. Probably, this could be the reason that you're not able to access Navigate button in SOTI surf.

As a workaround, I would suggest you to allow Google Maps (App) on the lock screen and blacklist all the browsers other than SOTI Surf and make SOTI surf browser as the default browser. And then in SOTI surf, you can whitelist only the sites you would want to access.

In your case, when user searches for 'Costa' and tries to access other sites using the link available in the maps application, all the websites are opening in the default browser and if your default browser is SOTI surf and you've whitelisted the content in SOTI surf, users wouldn't be able to open unwanted content.

Please try if that works for you.

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