The Native lockdown is leveraging a kiosk mode functionality that is inherent within the OS. This is a universal Android Enterprise paradigm that MobiControl is simply activating and configuring. Activity Suppression on the other hand is mode inherent to the SOTI Agent itself. This was the historical method of providing device lockdown that providers like SOTI came up with prior to the advent of the Native lockdown functionality that Google started to embed inside of the Android OS. Google originally developed their lockdown mode to be focused on single app, complete lockdown, for devices like ... kiosks, hence Kiosk mode. Over time Google has started to listen more and more to the multi-purpose dedicated device use case and has subsequently added more and more configurable control over their kiosk mode. This configurability has been built out with each new version of Android and therefore much of the now exposed configurability for the kiosk mode is not usable on older versions of Android as those older versions also include older versions of the embedded kiosk. This is exactly why you are seeing differences in behavior in the lockdown across your different versions of Android. This is not the fault or bug of SOTI, but rather a result of the fundamental design of the Native kiosk being a function embedded into the OS in Android Enterprise. To take advantage of the new configurable features you need to be on a newer version of the Android OS. No upgrades to MC or the Device Agent will fix that for you. If you don't have the ability to update the OS on the devices themselves then you likely will need to switch to Activity Suppression, which is dependent more on the agent version than the OS version for functionality.

Hello TORFS,,

Thanks for your post!

What MobiControl version and agent version do you have? 

If this resolves your query, please mark this post as the solution. Also, feel free to reach out if you need clarification or have any questions.

Regards,

Technical Support | SOTI Inc. |1.905.624.9828 | support@soti.net | www.soti.net |

You could also use activity suppression instead of native to get it to work on devices.

If this resolves your query, please mark this post as the solution. Also, feel free to reach out if you need clarification or have any questions.

Regards,

Technical Support | SOTI Inc. |1.905.624.9828 | support@soti.net | www.soti.net |

In addition to what Matt said, one possible solution in native-mode kiosk for each of your problematic device model/firmware combination(s) is to find out all app/activity module(s) responsible for notification-bar related services, and have it/them added directly to the kiosk mode profile or as  app-blacklist-exception(s) for the kiosk.  Please note that the tasks are not trivial and may need some special expertise to complete successfully.