How to test a launcher app for Knox compatibility

We develop an Android launcher and have recently released support for work profiles. In the Android for Work/Android Enterprise area we used an app called Test DPC which when installed on a mobile device created a fake work profile (showing apps in a separate work space with badged icons, etc).

I should mention - our intent is that our launcher app is contained in the personal space of the device and is able to interact with the work profile.

It appears that work for AFW does not entirely support or mesh with what is needed when a mobile device has been provisioned with Samsung Knox…but we are at a loss as to how to develop/test further – having some tool like Test DPC for Knox would be great, or even something in the RTL.

The nature of our launcher is like most others: we take a census of the apps on the device and then using that present them in a different form for users to launch and organize apps.

Perhaps we don’t understand Knox well enough to come up with a quick answer and in that case it would be useful to know if upon install/update of our launcher that we can detect there is a Knox component installed and disable some of our app’s features (so as to prevent user complaints).

Hello
You can reach out to the dedicated channel for Knox related support. https://developer.samsungknox.com/contact

You can find more documentations in the following website.
https://developer.samsungknox.com/

Hi,

Thank you for the timely response. The links to the support (docs, etc) isn’t much help to us. I can see that these docs would be helpful to, for example, IT admins who are setting up, configuring and troubleshooting their enterprise MDM install. Also, I think the information would be helpful to those ISVs that are developing apps that directly interact with the Knox system. What is missing (for us) is how we can test and troubleshoot our app’s compatibility with Knox – please know that our app doesn’t have any direct use of Knox APIs but we do expect it to be able to install and then used on devices that have Knox installed (even if we don’t use it in our app). Right now, our app is crashing a lot and all of the indications are that we are somehow interacting with Knox when it crashes. Here are some bits of information:

First you can see here what happened when we released our app – we got nearly a 100x increase in the amount of crashes:

image.png

Next – this amount of crashes has made our app disappear from the Play Store for our most important ASO terms.

We’re left with these traces, from Google crash reporting, and here you can see why we are approaching Samsung for resources:

It may help to know that this update of our app, the Before Launcher, extended our existing feature set to work with work profiles (tested with AE via the Test DPC app)

Again, thank you for the response. I hope this additional info allows you identify ways to reference help.

Joel Butler