Selecting a home screen experience for your Android Enterprise corporate-owned devices

By Abigail Stein – Product Manager | Microsoft Intune

With the August (2408) service release of Intune, Managed Home Screen (MHS) is now supported on Android Enterprise fully managed devices, in addition to Android Enterprise-only devices. With the update to supported devices for MHS, Microsoft Intune now provides more options for choosing the home screen experience for Android Enterprise enterprise-owned devices.

By default, your device comes pre-configured with a launcher created by your OEM. The launcher provides a background interface and configures access to other applications. To create a customized and consistent look and feel on these devices, you can choose to replace the default launcher. Read on to learn more about each home screen experience available on company-owned devices.

Microsoft Intune Home Screen Experience

What is Microsoft Launcher?

Microsoft Launcher is an Android app that helps users personalize their phones, organize them, and seamlessly switch between their phones and PCs. On fully managed Android Enterprise devices, IT administrators can customize the home screen by setting wallpapers, apps, and icon layouts, ensuring a consistent look across all managed devices.

For detailed steps on how to configure Microsoft Launcher, see: Configure Microsoft Launcher for Android Enterprise using Intune.

What is a managed home screen?

Managed Home Screen is an enterprise launcher application from Microsoft that gives IT administrators the ability to customize the device and limit the features that users can access. When configured in multi-app kiosk mode in Intune, Managed Home Screen automatically launches as the default home screen on the device. Regardless of what is installed on the device, administrators can choose which apps and system settings users can access from Managed Home Screen to ensure that the content they access is relevant to their work.

For detailed steps on how to configure MHS, please visit: How to set up Microsoft Managed Home Screen on a dedicated device in multi-app kiosk mode.

Start by choosing the registration method that best suits your scenario. Once you’ve chosen the registration method, you’ll need to choose the device experience that best suits your needs.

Choose how to register your device

When enrolling corporate-owned Android devices, you have several options to choose from depending on your intended use case.

Android Enterprise Enterprise-owned work profile: Select this if you associate the device with a single user and want to separate the work and personal profiles.

Android Enterprise Fully Managed: You should select this option if you are associating the device with a single user.

Dedicated to Android Enterprise devices: This must be selected if the device is a shared device. For dedicated devices, you can choose whether to enroll the device with or without shared device mode.

Use Microsoft Entra shared device mode: You should select this option if the device requires users to sign in to Microsoft 365 or other SDM or Intune SDK integrated applications. You should also select this option if you want to leverage app protection policies or conditional access policies for signed-in users on the device.

No Microsoft Entra Shared Device Mode: You should select this option if the device does not require users to sign in to the SDM integration application.

For more information on choosing the right registration type, visit: Android Device Enrollment Guide for Microsoft Intune.

Choose your device experience

When selecting an enrollment method, administrators can choose from a variety of device environment options available for each enrollment method.

Android Enterprise Enterprise-owned work profile devices

For Android Enterprise enterprise-owned work profile devices, the Microsoft Enterprise Launcher is not supported. These devices must leverage the default OEM Launcher or the customer launcher.

Android Enterprise Fully Managed Devices

For fully managed devices, administrators can choose between Microsoft Launcher and Managed Home Screen, depending on the desired behavior of the device.

When to choose each device experience

Select Microsoft Launcher to allow users to access all available applications and all device settings on the device. Select Managed Home Screen to allow users to access only the apps and settings specifically allowed for use in kiosk mode.

The main differences are:

Devices for Android Enterprise only

For Android Enterprise-only devices, administrators can choose between single-app and multi-app kiosk modes.

When to choose each device experience

Single App Kiosk Mode locks the device to a single app. This locks the user to a single app of their choice, which is always started and cannot be exited.

Multi-app allows users to access a limited set of apps and sets the device launcher as a managed home screen. Additionally, unlike single-app kiosk mode, enabling the “Kiosk Pin Exit” setting allows users to exit MHS.

conclusion

In this blog post, we showed you how to choose a device home screen experience for your enterprise-owned devices. These home screen experiences can help you customize the look and feel of your devices and improve your productivity. We hope you find these experiences useful and easy to set up with Intune. If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment below. Tag it @IntuneSoupTeam About X, Or contact us through our support channels.