Option for MDM to place app shortcuts on home screen

I tested DeX customization via the Knox Service Plugin quite a while ago. There is definitely a good selection of settings.

I believe that Samsung also supported a few basic settings such as a default background in Android Legacy. Even though it didn't work so well with COPE solutions, I thought it was a pity that it didn't make it into Android Enterprise.

For the DEX screen only, yes.

There it worked at least as you can provide the app and X + Y coordinates and that worked well.

As you have only one screen, not as on normal homescreen, where you can have multiple, the "page" option is missing. And as said, limited to the dex screen itself, not affecting the normal home screen.

Yeah, I really like the idea that this would help to provide a smoother onboarding, first impressions with a new device (like anything) are always so important. 

Do you feel this request comes up quite a lot? Michel​ 

I'm also with you on the idea of having an FR board in the community. I was hoping to have a step towards this last year, but the timing just wasn't right and it's so important that an FR board on a community works well. I don't want to let you all down 😀 with your feature requests. Sooo one day, one day...

Hi Lizzie​,

thank you for mentioning me.

At the moment, we do not have a use case for placing app shortcuts on home screens for normal user enrollments (such like fully managed or corporate owned personally enabled). Our need for placing app shortcuts is limited to kiosk configurations, where we use the available kiosk settings to place apps on the kiosk home screen.

Kind regards, 
Sandy

Hey Lizzie​,

even I'm from same spot as Stinus​ i think i can add more relevant information why a "kiosk" mode isn't a solution to us in any way. Just put on some facts:

• We provide configurations somehow globally to entire fleet if possible (if settings are the same).
• We try to have the settings in any country the same where "country" is the minimum to have the same setup from mobile side.
• But we can have different apps provided per country (yes many are the same but some countries have additional specific ones like voip app,...).

Negatives of a kiosk/lockdown (such in our scenario, there are ofc in other scenarios positives):

• With lockdown we remove the ability for stores to find more effective ways to sort the apps (we might be get notified about new order wished because was tested already by stores)
  • Result: Less flexibility / improvement
• With lockdown we remove the ability to freely remove/add other shortcuts (even for ex. chrome web-shortcuts) if a (single) store finds it usefull.
  • Result: Less flexibility
• If we would go with kiosk mode, we most likely would need to provide (worst case scenario) one kiosk (Lockdown called in our MDM) profile configuration per country (~30) to provide stores all relevant apps.
  • Result: Massive workload in configuration and MDM distribution
• On each change (app removed, app added, placement changed) we would need to change it for minimum one country, most likely many countries (so up to ~30 times).
  • Result: Massive workload in configuration/management

If we could arrange icons on homescreen from Android:

• We keep the flexibility for the users
• We don't need to take care of any app regarding shortcut (we only want to place some of the most important ones to defined places)
• A change (app or placement changes) would be a change in one profile (way less configuration/management effort)
• If it would be implemented in native Android:
  • No need of external launchers
    • maybe saving money (if a chosen launcher would come with costs)
    • one less app/license to be managed
    • still using native Android (troubleshooting is easier as external launchers also can be the cause of issues)
  • making Android more flexible in this area which would mean also more attractive to enterprise
  • some OS (partially) provide this already 
    • Motorola via oem config (in total)
    • Samsung via oem config (only for DEX screen)

And yes, there are few things which also need to be defined (maybe by options), like: Should these icons be "sticky" on their position or after first placement being allowed to be moved around? Should they moved back when they got deleted or moved? And so on...

In general we would need ideally X and Y placement + page + option if sticky or not (maybe per app). Everything could be an option by MDM (if you want to move them back if they got moved, just provide this setting again on a checkin resulting the icons to be moved to their defined position again).

Currently we leverage various 3rd party launchers, including one we built in-house, to accomplish this, so while I would certainly love to see similar functionality built into Android and manageable from MDMs (I'm always a fan of native functionality as it typically just works better), I'm not sure it is something that Google should prioritize.  I'm certainly interested in this topic though.

I fully understand this wish, but from our side we are more concerned with the options not using Kiosk Mode; we prefer to let users interact with the normal Android interface, and this is where I don't understand why Google can't (or won't?) provide the possibility of placing shortcuts on the home screen.

There are many things they could do but don't today. Resourcing and priorities (outside of revenue obligations) drive a lot of it, so it's probably just very far down the list. 

We're into our 7th(?) year of AMAPI and still don't have feature parity with custom DPC, so plenty yet to do!