Author Topic: Android Work Profile and Sandboxing Apps  (Read 5550 times)

miked1541

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Android Work Profile and Sandboxing Apps
« on: March 20, 2022, 03:44:18 am »
Does anybody here have any experience with Android Work Profile and any of the sandboxing apps out there? 

The reason I ask is because my current employer has a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program instead of handing out a company-provided mobile like my previous employer.  I am used to carrying two devices, but I have been entertaining the thought of carrying one device with 2 sim cards (possibly the Astro Slide.)

So far, I have found the Island app in the Google Play Store and Shelter in f-droid.  I'm not sure if there are others out there or which is the better one to use.  I just installed Shelter on my Gemini wifi running the stock OS that it came with (Android 7.x) and have not done much testing yet.

Has any of you had any experience with Android apps that uses work profile to separate personal apps and data from work on the same devices?  Does it really work and keep things separate ?  Are there any things I should look out for with having work and personal on the same device?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!

miked1541

Radovan Garabík

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Re: Android Work Profile and Sandboxing Apps
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2022, 08:47:05 am »
I am using island on my (non-Planet) tablet and it works as expected, no major problems. On my Cosmo I do not need the sandboxing, but just out of curiosity, I tried both shelter and island and while they work, reclaiming resources (i.e. killing sandboxed apps) kept killing my mainland termux session (no matter what I did) so I uninstalled them.

Another way of separating would be to create multiple android users (available on Cosmo, but probably not on 7.* Gemini), but this has two major drawbacks - switching the users takes some time (half a minute or so), and background processes of the other user(s) keep running and occupying the RAM, even if I use the other user only occasionally.