Dear Community,
I am writing this here as I have logged calls with support and unfortunately the responses has been terrible considering this has been ongoing since March/April this year and call backs are allegedly done every 48hrs but in reality they never happen.
On June 16th I received the last call from support around the issue logged under case 86347415, I agreed that I would test their suspected support resolution. I was able to test a few with support on the phone not realizing that the management profile was not active on the device.
I had to leave it as this due to my kid needing to scan QR code for check-in at his summer camp and as such was not able to test for a while.
I eventually got to testing and this is what I have found.
Using an iPhone Mini 13 Version: 17.5.1 Model no.: MLAQ3LL/A with Verizon as the carrier. I have the management profile installed on the device and the VPN is connected, the VPN connection is On-Demand.
With Supervision turned off across all activity's (WEB, TIME, APP,LOCATION,SCHOOL TIME,SEARCH,VIDEO) I am unable to scan the QR-Code which was created linking to Cartoon Network. I receive the error "No useable data found". When I enter the Norton family browser on my child's device and access House rules with the intent to refresh them, I can see that there are two House rules active after I disabled all of the activities. Namely, "Websites I visit are not monitored" and "Searches I perform are not monitored".
I go one step further and disable Supervision all together for him, looking in the Norton family browser on my child's device to refresh I can see that "Norton family browser is turned off" with that in play scanning the same QR-Code yields the same result and error saying "no useable data found".
What I learn through this is that the changes affected in the portal to change settings to profiles are almost instantaneous as these changes were made from my device while I was testing using my child's device. I made sure that I tested this over time in each scenario to make sure that I wasn't acting too fast between changes.
When I access iphone settings>General>VPN & Device Management>VPN and I look at Norton Family, I disabled on-demand before disabling the VPN connection, The VPN connection remained disabled and scanning the QR-Code yields the same result "no useable data found".
I reconnected the VPN, and removed the Management profile. I received notification on my device that "XXXX's iPhone Profile is Missing on XXX's device." After receiving this message I scanned the QR code and it provided the link and the site opened in Safari. I then restricted safari using Apple's restrictions leaving only Norton Family Browser as a suitable browser on the phone. When I scanned the QR code I was presented with an error "no useable data found"
I then downloaded chrome on IOS but found that as soon as I disable Safari, it also disables chrome, the same happened with firefox. Even with these apps installed and set as the default browser, but somehow hidden due to the apple restrictions, I still was not able to scan the QR-Code with the camera.
Toggling the VPN off at this point made no difference as the error remained.
My conclusion is this, when using the apple iphone to scan for QR-Code's apple would make use of the default browser to open the QR-Code, I was able to scan the QR-Code when Safari, Chrome or Firefox was the set as the default browser and enabled. I can not set Norton family app as a browser and I believe this is how Norton gets around Apple's restrictions of disabling browsers. When I disable Safari, Chrome and Firefox disappear as well, leaving me no access to any browser or app classified as a browser according to apple. The iPhone then does not know of an app available to open the data and the error is presented as "no useable data found".
The workaround to allow access to QR code is simply to remove the management profile as the profile itself restricts safari, when the profile is removed the camera will scan the QR-code and present the data in Safari/chrome/firecox whichever is set as the default browser, However this leaves a loophole for content restriction as required.
I hope the above provide context and clarity to the issue. Please let me know if you need any more information to help replicate this on your end.
Regards
Armand