I am having trouble maintaining kiosk mode on my iPad. It starts out fine when I open my kiosk app and often stays fine for a while. But eventually, it will start showing the blue banner at the top again. I think I’ve read all the posts on this topic. Most are from a few years ago so, it seems like most people have solved this problem. Yet it persists for me.
I’m using Kiosker Pro, which, I assume, is much like the Fully Kiosk app that I see mentioned often. It has a place to enter a URL to which I have dutifully appended the “?kisok=true”.
Kiosker Pro also has an option to toggle the browser nav bar. When I first start up I can see my URL with the “?kiosk=true” and it’s working fine. When the blue banner shows up and I toggle on the nav I see the URL but the “?kiosk=true” is no longer there.
But I’m not sure that means much. I have tiles that navigate to other dashboards. If I go to a second dashboard and back again, then check the nav bar, the “?kiosk=true” is gone but the blue bar has not appeared. Perhaps I am still in kiosk mode and it just doesn’t show in the URL anymore. So maybe that’s not a useful indicator.
I’ve tried setting up hyperlinks with the “?kiosk=true” appended and use hyperlink tiles to navigate (instead of dashboard tiles), but I get the same performance either way.
I have ‘automatic reload’ turned off. I have ‘reload on error’ turned on. I’m on a wall-mounted iPad connected via WiFi. The WiFi can drop in and out occasionally, so that might be triggering a reload on error. But I have no easy way of verifying that.
I don’t quite understand how kiosk mode persists and what causes it to drop out. Is there anything in my description that points to an issue? Or any test I can perform to find out?
I also have a similar problem - just not had time to troubeshoot or work with Josh to get resolved.
In my case, I am just using a ‘Add to Home Screen’ approach. After a period of time, it’s loses the kiosk mode. It started after the change to socket connections was implemented some time back.
My iPad does lose WiFi connection sometimes (nothing to do with SharpTools) and I guess that may be the trigger point for when kiosk mode is lost but I can’t prove that.
What if a custom tile was created that would reload the open dashboard with the ?kiosk=true appended. I think I’ve heard that these custom tiles can do something in a periodic fashion, so maybe every 15 minutes the code in the tile opens URL? This way, if it does fall out of kiosk mode, it would jump back in within 15 minutes. How would I write something like that?
I was thinking that we could add this to the native Dashboard navigation functionality - basically keeping the ?kiosk=true appended to the URL if you are already in kiosk mode and navigate to another dashboard page.
I’m heads down on a big platform update at the moment, but I’ve made note of the request.
It seems a bit odd that Kiosker Pro is reloading the currently navigated to page. As you alluded to, maybe there’s something else like a brief Wifi drop-out that’s causing it to reload the page even though you’ve explicitly disabled the various reload settings (including testing disabling the Reload on Error). Unfortunately, I’m not intimately familiar with Kiosker Pro and any other setting that might be available to customize this behaviour.
The SharpTools web app is capable of automatically recovering from brief network issues, so it the kiosk browser really does not need to reload the page as that’s much more inefficient than just letting the SharpTools web app automatically handle the reconnection behind the scenes.