How to prevent turning off location services on Android and Apple devices?

How to prevent turning off location services on Android and Apple devices?

Many organizations like logistics companies or cab services, track corporate devices locations to ensure that the user bearing the device is on the right track. To obtain the most recent device location, the organizations must enable Location Services on the devices at all times. But many users tend to disable the Location Services on devices either to reduce battery consumption or to avoid displaying the device location for privacy reasons. WeGuard lets you know the current device location in near real-time. Additionally, it allows organizations to permanently keep Location Services on and prevent location services from being turned off or disabled on iPhone and Android devices.

How to lock location services on Android devices or Apple devices like iPhones? You can permanently enable and lock Location Services on Android devices, over-the-air using MDM. In case of iOS devices, you must have the device in hand to permanently enable Location Services, as Apple doesn't allow location services from being turned-off over-the-air to protect user privacy.



Pre-requisites

Android: Devices or must be provisioned as Device Owner.

iOS: Devices must be with the Administrator, as the settings need to be manually configured on the devices and should be secured with a passcode.


How to prevent turning off Location Services on iOS devices

The steps to prevent disabling/turning off Location Services for continuous tracking of device location, differ for devices running OS versions above iOS 12 and below iOS 12.


On devices running iOS 12 or later versions

  • Click on Settings and select Screen Time. Now click on Turn On Screen Time.

  • Click on Continue, when prompted. Click on the option, This is My iPhone and select Content & Privacy Restrictions.

  • Firstly, enable Content & Privacy Restrictions and click on Location Services

  • Enable Location Services, which then displays the list of apps that require location permission. Verify if the WeGuard MDM app has the permission set as Always or While using the app.

  • Once verified, select the option Don't Allow Changes to prevent turning off Location Services on your iPhone.

  • Now, go back to Screen Time and click on the option Use Screen Time Passcode and set a passcode for Screen Time, which prevents the device user from modifying the settings without the passcode. To disable it, you need to go to Screen Time and click on Turn Off Screen Time and provide the passcode, when prompted.


Note: The above Settings will not work on the device when the Screen Time restriction is applied via Policy Group.



On devices running below iOS 12

  • Navigate to Settings -> General -> Restrictions.

  • Click on Enable Restrictions and specify a restrictions passcode, when prompted.

  • Navigate to the Privacy section and select Location Services. Enable the Location Services option. Under the Location Services menu, all the apps installed on the device are listed. You can disable/ enable Location Services for the apps here. Once this has been configured and the settings saved, the Location Services cannot be modified for the existing apps. If any new app is installed after the settings have been configured, Location Services will not be granted to the app. To modify Location Services for the apps, the settings have to be re-configured.

  • Finally, select the option Don't Allow Changes in the Location Services menu, which ensure the settings configured in the previous steps cannot be modified by the users. To disable, you need to navigate to Settings -> General -> Restrictions, click on Disable Restrictions, and specify the restrictions passcode when prompted.

  • To apply this restriction to keep location always turned ON on multiple devices, take a backup of a device after disabling location services and restore the backup on multiple devices using the steps given here.


Note: In the case of devices whose OS has been updated from iOS 11.x to iOS 12.x, you need to disable Location Services again, Apple moved it from Restrictions to Screen Time.



How to prevent disabling Location Services on Android devices?

To prevent disabling location services on Android devices, follow the steps given below:


  • On the WeGuard Portal, navigate to Policy Group and select the appropriate policy.


  • Find the Location and select “Location ON” from the drop down.


  • Go to the Security section and find Share Location Disabled; Make sure this is toggled always toggled off to get the Location data from the device. If enabled, device won’t share any Location data with server.

 


WeGuard also provide WeTrack feature to track the devices in real-time without any third party application. WeTrack provides you with the complete report of location history based on the track frequency set (1min, 10min,...Etc,. ). Click here to find more details on WeTrack.




We hope this article was useful. Thank you for reading.

For more WeGuard insights, please explore the Visual Knowledge-base Series

For more details, please visit https://www.weguard.com

If you need any help on this, do call up WeGuard Support at +1(737) 931-1410 Ext. 102 or contact WeGuard Support Email or Initiate Chat





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