Guest mode on Android

Bembel

Hi,

 

I have many licenses for all of my Android devices including 2 for my kids' Moto G5S Plus mobile phones. Both are running the latest available stock ROM (7.1.1 patch level June 2018) with the latest version of F-Secure SAFE and enabled parental control.

 

Being a satisfied customer I really thout that properly configured F-Secure software should be more than enough  to restrict the kids in time and content until I had to find out that they were using Android Guest profiles to play as long as they wanted to accessing all available content - for example plaing until 3am in the morning and streaming 20 GB of YouTube content in a month.

 

Is there any way to prevent switching to a guest profile? Well if not, using this product is pretty pointless for any customer using a current Android device because it is not really rocket science to switch users.

 

What I did now on a rainy day (after the boy's playing session until 3am) was unlocking the Bootloader hence wiping the device, rooting it and adding two simple lines to the build.prop of the device disabling multiuser and hiding the user dialogue in settings making the device single user again. The downside of this - I don't get OTA updates from the manufacturer anymore.

 

Isn't this an option or maybe there is a different one to prevent this rights elevation even a nine year old was able to figure out?

 

Thank you so much for you input in advance!

[Deleted User]

Hi Bembel,

 

Welcome to F-Secure Community!

 

We will get back to you with any update.

 

Thank you

Bembel

Dear Pavitra,

 

were you able to reproduce this?

 

Thanks for your assistance in advance!

[Deleted User]

Hi Bembel,

 

Thank you for your patience. I have already highlighted this to the product team. Our developers will take a look into this, but this is an OS feature which may be difficult to bypass.

 

Based on some online forums, some have mentioned that changing some settings value with adb worked. Googling the following command might help:

adb shell settings put global guest_user_enabled0

NOTE: We have not been able to test this ourselves to confirm

Thank you.

Bembel

Hi Pavitra,

 

that is something I tested directly but it just removed the icon in the notification bar.

It is still possible to create a guest profil  in the settings so it wouldn't make too much sense.

 

Furthermore the icon turned up after reboot anyway if I recall correctly.

 

Thanks for taking care of this!

johnpark

I have also noticed this option of using a software as a guest. This guest login is nothing but just that the software can be used without any subscription. I thought it might be any problem with my account being a subscriber of it for which I went through Google Play Store Customer Service and hey said that some of the software is having this issue recently.

Ukko

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@johnpark  wrote:

I have also noticed this option of using a software as a guest. This guest login is nothing but just that the software can be used without any subscription. I thought it might be any problem with my account being a subscriber of it for which I went through Rogue-URL and hey said that some of the software is having this issue recently.

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Based on provided URL - you went through rogue campaign or even through malicious website.

Do ask Google Play Store Customer Service instead (with their support capability):

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en