Device admin protection not effective for a few seconds after reboot

[György]

Hi, 

My son has an Xperia E4 phone, and we have installed a parental control app which is protected by Device admin privileges so that parental control cannot be stopped or removed. We use this parental control app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.screentime.rc

Normally, the user cannot disable the Device admin privileges, as that will trigger the phone to be locked with a password. However, we discovered that after rebooting the phone, for a few seconds it is possible to disable Device admin privileges without triggering the screen lock that should normally occur. This leads to a vulnerability of the parental control, i.e. the child can arbitrarily change the parental control settings. 

I have contacted that developers of the parental control app and they suggested that this is due to some problem in the Xperia platform, as this issue is not present with other Android devices. We have also experienced that a similar issue occurs with other parental control software as well, suggesting that this is indeed an Xperia issue somehow related to the bootup process. 

Any ideas how this issue can be addressed on the Xperia platform?

Thanks,

--György

[Uliwooly]

@György

That's an interesting answer, but since this is a non Sony app this has to be addressed by the app developer not Sony. Just like any other non-Sony app, game, widget, any bug or issue has to be addressed by the app/game developers. 

[György]

I suspect that this is an Xperia issue not an app specific issue, because other phones did not experience the problem, while we get the same consistent issue over Xperia E4. We suspect that there might be some Xperia-specific differences in how the apps are loaded during bootup which leads to the problem.

Regards,

 --György

[Uliwooly]

@György

You can contact Sony directly >>> Local support

but this is something the app developer has to addressed, again, because its not a Sony app/service. Probably the app requires root access but that's a thought.