Unable to download file from website using Chrome android browser with whitelist enabled

Good day,

We’ve got an odd issue I'm hoping someone can assist us with.

Issue description:

Unable to download a file from a specific part of a site. When attempting to do so a brief loading symbol appears before nothing happens. Download’s from other areas work as expected.

Tech stack:

EMM: SOTI MobiControl

Device Type: Mix of Samsung devices tested running between android 14 and 16.

Managed config in use: Yes, specifically the “Allow access to a list of URLs “ and “Block access to a list of URLs” with Block access set too: ["*"]. (i can’t show the contents of allow access for privacy reasons but its working as expected other than this issue described here)

Chrome app version:  147.0.7727.101 Note: This was not an issue in version 134.0.6998.135 of the app which we reproduced and verified.

Investigated so far:

1. Removing the whitelist/allow access in managed config results in the download working as expected. Its quite clear therefore that the allow access list is playing a major role here.
2. Ensured all relevant URL’s that we could find, this includes those provided by the website developer themselves, were whitelisted. Still did not work.
3. Checked what type of request was sent by the website when clicking on the download button. The download button that does not work makes a POST request while the download button that does work makes a GET request.
4. The request does not appear to be a blob URL itself (can’t see URL.createObjectURL in the request), though unclear whether the download source is blob storage.
5. It appears there were some significant changes to how blob is handled in newer versions, but having looked at the managed config none of the two blob settings in have any effect.
6. Attempted to whitelist the blob schema using blob://<domain> but either we have the wrong format or this did nothing. And currently it doesn’t ‘appear to be a blob URL anyway thats used and so this could be expected behaviour.
7. Worked through almost all settings in managed config as a last resort to see if anything had an effect which it did not.

Just to reiterate, this works perfectly with version 134.0.6998.135 of the chrome app, any higher version it immediately stops working.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Robert