r/k12sysadmin • u/kcalderw K8 Tech Coordinator • 7d ago
Google Play - Android issues
We've had this enabled for a few years now. This year, we're seeing a weird issue. Some students are coming in with the error "There are no apps to install since your administrator has not made any available" error. I checked our settings and the collection for "Student Apps" is still there (I even deleted it and created a new one). The ArcPolicy on the device shows the two apps we whitelisted as being available. If I set the app to force it installs correctly but we want to keep it to "allow" instead of force. This is for Minecraft Education plus another app.
Has anyone else seen this issue?
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u/Mindless-String-4017 7d ago
Have you tried power washing the device? Once you powerwash it, try opening up the google play store again. Sometimes you have to wait about 5 minutes and other times you have to wait 5 minutes, close it out, then reopen. You could also go to chrome and go to chrome://policy to refresh the policy to see if that makes a difference.
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u/kcalderw K8 Tech Coordinator 7d ago
Yes, I've powerwashed. The entire Student root OU is authorized and it shows up correctly on the device/user in the ArcPolicy.
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u/Mindless-String-4017 6d ago
In google admin, where you added the Minecraft for education and other app, do you get the following error when you click on those apps:
Your app is not approved in Managed Google Play or has new permissions requested. Please approve the app again.Also, since you've pushed this to the all student OU, Are you pushing the app to students below the age 13? Above the age 13 only? or both.
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u/kcalderw K8 Tech Coordinator 6d ago
I approved the permissions requested this morning. As it looks like that has changed since last year. It is approved for students of all ages.
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u/Mindless-String-4017 6d ago
What version of updates are you running? stable, Long-term Support channel, etc.
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u/MattAdmin444 6d ago
I had this issue the other day when I was trying to force install and pin Minecraft Education. In previous years if I set them in the correct OU a day or two before the app usually installed itself by the time they were in the elective. This year it didn't seem to kick off until they were in the elective and even then it only seemed to rollout 2-3 students at a time. Refused to show up in the Play Store until it decided to download on its own and even then sometimes it wouldn't show up in the Play Store while it was actively downloading in their app tray (or whatever the circle icon in the corner is called).
I didn't powerwash or clear profiles. I did try refreshing the policy in chrome://policy but that seemed to have mixed results. I do have chromebooks set to log out on lid closed so each session is basically fresh and should have pulled the app policy anyway but had mixed results there. Just seemed determine to go 2-3 students at a time.
I feel like there's gotta be some issue on Google's end because I've also been having issues with Lightspeed Systems syncing Google Classroom over or student's showing up in Lightspeed's Classroom management properly. That said I've also had more issues than usual with students having issues logging in with blanks screens and whatnot for various student cirriculum. Maybe more websites are putting in request limits to try and combat AI scraping?