This article describes how to safely remove Android traybar icon in XenMobile.

Background

XenMobile has a lot of great policies to manage your users' mobile devices. I'm going to discuss one in particular that can be a little tricky. We'll be updating our documentation to cover this in a bit more detail as well, but I'm calling it out because it's important to configure it correctly.

Points to Remember

• In the "XenMobile Options" policy there's an option for Android devices called "hide try icon".
• If not configured correctly this policy setting can cause Citrix Secure Hub to get killed by the OS, and thus your policies might not get pushed to the device.
  • By disabling this app notification the OS lowers its process priority and can kill Secure Hub at any time. This will break Secure Hub background MDM.
• This policy setting is safe as long as Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is configured. (in Settings -> Google Cloud Messaging)
  • That's because GCM is used to wake up Secure Hub when needed.
• This policy setting should never be enabled if GCM is not enabled.

Instructions

You may have noticed that when you enroll an Android device that you now have a Secure Hub icon in your notification tray (in the top-left corner).

This is a "sticky" notification icon. No matter how much an end-user might try to dismiss it, this Secure Hub icon will stubbornly remain in their list of notifications. On some Android versions this icon will also remain forever on their lock screen. This might understandably irk your end-users, and so this is a small convenience policy that I usually always apply to all Android devices.

You'll find this policy in the XenMobile server console when you navigate to Configure > Device Policies > Add. In the dialog window that appears expand the More section, and select XenMobile Options (under the XenMobile Agent category).

In the Android section of this policy you'll see a toggle option for Traybar notification - hide traybar icon.  Set this to On to disable that sticky Secure Hub notification icon.

However, as mentioned in the "Points to Remember" section, without this notification icon Android will lower the priority of the Secure Hub app. If it needs to free up some resources it will kill Secure Hub rather than keep it running in the background. When that happens then any new MDM policies that you push will not get applied to the device until Secure Hub runs again.

That's where Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) comes in. GCM can wake up Secure Hub if it's not running when a new policy needs to be applied. See the docs for how to configure Google Cloud Messaging in XenMobile.

In summary "hide traybar icon" is a very handy convenience policy for Android devices but be sure to configure Google Cloud Messaging.