Before long, we will be purchasing a large set of phones for our outreach
teams to collect outreach data.
Even only on our initial 5 phones, I find that every day, of course, the
phone is dealing with updating, to the newest version, android apps on the
phone that are irrelevant to our use (Google play music, Youtube, galaxy
rewards, etc, etc, etc).
Have any of you taken a methodical approach to actually *deleting *a lot of
unneeded apps from the phone, just to simplify this ongoing update stuff?
I recognize that it may not be necessary and that if we tell the phone to
only update when it has wifi, it's maybe not a giant issue.
1-- What is your approach for a "lean" phone that doesn't spend time and
bandwidth updating unused apps every day? Changing settings for update?
Deleting apps? Or?
2-- Also, do you have any other tips for how you configure or manage your
large number of phones? Even down to the process of using excel or other
apps to track the phones' current user, etc?
A lot of our projects use the app "AppLock" to hide the myriad of apps
that come installed on every phone and help provide a clean experience.
If your phones are somewhat new and are running the Android 4.0
platform, they come with some limited support for automatic provisioning.
You can use the phone's Backup/Restore functionality to set up one phone,
back it up, and then "Restore" it onto the others. We don't have a concrete
process/recommendation for this yet, but it can really speed up a lot of
the manual configuration.
-Clayton
···
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 3:10 AM, Eric Stephan wrote:
Hi all --
Before long, we will be purchasing a large set of phones for our outreach
teams to collect outreach data.
Even only on our initial 5 phones, I find that every day, of course, the
phone is dealing with updating, to the newest version, android apps on the
phone that are irrelevant to our use (Google play music, Youtube, galaxy
rewards, etc, etc, etc).
Have any of you taken a methodical approach to actually *deleting *a lot
of unneeded apps from the phone, just to simplify this ongoing update
stuff? I recognize that it may not be necessary and that if we tell the
phone to only update when it has wifi, it's maybe not a giant issue.
1-- What is your approach for a "lean" phone that doesn't spend time and
bandwidth updating unused apps every day? Changing settings for update?
Deleting apps? Or?
2-- Also, do you have any other tips for how you configure or manage your
large number of phones? Even down to the process of using excel or other
apps to track the phones' current user, etc?
I also tend to "Disable" some built-in apps. This prevents them from
auto-updating and taking up too much space on the phone (ex. Google Play
Music). You can do this by going to Settings, Applications, choose the
application and then choose the disable option.
Thanks,
Sheel
···
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Clayton Sims wrote:
Eric,
Two things that you might find helpful:
A lot of our projects use the app "AppLock" to hide the myriad of apps
that come installed on every phone and help provide a clean experience.
If your phones are somewhat new and are running the Android 4.0
platform, they come with some limited support for automatic provisioning.
You can use the phone's Backup/Restore functionality to set up one phone,
back it up, and then "Restore" it onto the others. We don't have a concrete
process/recommendation for this yet, but it can really speed up a lot of
the manual configuration.
Before long, we will be purchasing a large set of phones for our outreach
teams to collect outreach data.
Even only on our initial 5 phones, I find that every day, of course, the
phone is dealing with updating, to the newest version, android apps on the
phone that are irrelevant to our use (Google play music, Youtube, galaxy
rewards, etc, etc, etc).
Have any of you taken a methodical approach to actually *deleting *a lot
of unneeded apps from the phone, just to simplify this ongoing update
stuff? I recognize that it may not be necessary and that if we tell the
phone to only update when it has wifi, it's maybe not a giant issue.
1-- What is your approach for a "lean" phone that doesn't spend time and
bandwidth updating unused apps every day? Changing settings for update?
Deleting apps? Or?
2-- Also, do you have any other tips for how you configure or manage your
large number of phones? Even down to the process of using excel or other
apps to track the phones' current user, etc?
In terms of data usage you can also configure the "Disable Mobile
Background Data" setting on android (its location depends a bit depending
on your phone model), but that will prevent most apps (like the play store
or google services) from constantly using up data unless the phone is on
WIFI. Keep in mind that it will also prevent CommCare's binary from
updating automatically (The Software Client itself, not your application.
Your application's update cycle is managed internally by CommCare).
-Clayton
···
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Sheel Shah wrote:
Hey Eric,
I also tend to "Disable" some built-in apps. This prevents them from
auto-updating and taking up too much space on the phone (ex. Google Play
Music). You can do this by going to Settings, Applications, choose the
application and then choose the disable option.
Thanks,
Sheel
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Clayton Sims csims@dimagi.com wrote:
Eric,
Two things that you might find helpful:
A lot of our projects use the app "AppLock" to hide the myriad of apps
that come installed on every phone and help provide a clean experience.
If your phones are somewhat new and are running the Android 4.0
platform, they come with some limited support for automatic provisioning.
You can use the phone's Backup/Restore functionality to set up one phone,
back it up, and then "Restore" it onto the others. We don't have a concrete
process/recommendation for this yet, but it can really speed up a lot of
the manual configuration.
Before long, we will be purchasing a large set of phones for our
outreach teams to collect outreach data.
Even only on our initial 5 phones, I find that every day, of course, the
phone is dealing with updating, to the newest version, android apps on the
phone that are irrelevant to our use (Google play music, Youtube, galaxy
rewards, etc, etc, etc).
Have any of you taken a methodical approach to actually *deleting *a
lot of unneeded apps from the phone, just to simplify this ongoing update
stuff? I recognize that it may not be necessary and that if we tell the
phone to only update when it has wifi, it's maybe not a giant issue.
1-- What is your approach for a "lean" phone that doesn't spend time and
bandwidth updating unused apps every day? Changing settings for update?
Deleting apps? Or?
2-- Also, do you have any other tips for how you configure or manage
your large number of phones? Even down to the process of using excel or
other apps to track the phones' current user, etc?