Android MDM for Home Users
 

I am finding some of my aging family members are increasingly in need of guardrails where their Android phones and tablets are concerned as they keep downloading shady apps and falling for fake virus ads and fake shopify hosted stores that pollute Facebook and Google search results.

So the the ability to lock down the Google Play store, block malicious and scammy URLs and force their devices to use dns0.eu is appealing to me.

However I have only approached MDMs before from a enterprise perspective and the vendor my former employer preferred would not be suitable for six to eight devices.

I know there are some roll your own open-source alternatives but I don't think keeping a cloud server updated and patched for the next decade or more for the sake of just a handful of devices is practical.

So I would be curious to know if anyone here has had to address this use case before and what platform they chose.

Would setting up a second user just for them work? Those can generally be locked down somewhat.

Like you, I'm used to dealing with intune/SOTI/Meraki and similar apps, but one that comes up once in a while is ManageEngine. I haven't used them but it would hurt to look?

https://www.manageengine.com/mobile-...-software.html

Thanks I will give that a shot. I really had no idea there were hundreds of products in this space.

These people are spread out between the US and Canada and I don't have regular physical access to their devices.

Trust me, I know how you feel. I have relatives scattered throughout the world and I would love to limit access to certain apps.... the amount of misinformation that they send me drives me bonkers. Not even counting suspicious links.

I finally got around to setting this up, beginning with a few tablets.

Locking down a ZTE Android tablet worked just great, but I struggled with a Lenovo one as certain UI customization clashed with the MDM policy in a broken way. The policy ultimately worked but it was still possible to view broken menus and so forth.