Kiosk Mode

Kiosk mode locks a phone or a tablet to one app. The home button, the notifications, the browser and the app store all stop being reachable. The person in front of the screen can do the job and nothing else. Android and the iPad both have this built in, and switching it on costs nothing.

You have seen it without knowing the name. The tablet at a coffee counter where staff tap in the order. The handheld a shop assistant carries down the aisle to count stock. The screen by a gym door where members type a number to check in. The device belongs to the business, and every minute spent elsewhere on it is a minute taken from the work.

The quiet benefit is the mistakes it prevents. A tablet that cannot leave the ordering screen cannot end up playing a video at the till. It cannot show a private message in the middle of a stock count. Nobody can sign out of the app by accident and hand the next shift a locked screen at eight in the morning. Most of what goes wrong on a shared device is not theft. It is drift, and this removes drift.

Setting it up is a matter of degree. Android has a simple version called screen pinning, which anyone can switch on in seconds and anyone can also switch off. The stronger version needs the tablet registered as a company device, and then only the office can leave the app. Apple has Guided Access for a single device and a locked single-app setting for a managed fleet. Choose the stronger one for anything a customer can touch.

Two things catch people out. An update or a restart can drop the device out of the locked app, so it has to return there by itself when it powers on. And the manager needs a way in that is not a code written on tape stuck to the back of the tablet. The counter screens in Storek and the check-in screen in Nadiva are built to run locked like this, and Linkysoft sets the same rules on any app made for a shop floor. Linkysoft usually asks a shop to live with one locked tablet for a week before it buys ten.