A little background first. I’m developing an application for corporate devices running on the Android platform. It won’t be distributed on the Play store and thus, is unavailable to the general public. The devices are owned by the company and its only purpose is to run this application. So accessing the home screen/notifications/application history/ app drawer are unnecessary and in fact we want to focus the user experience directly on this application.
The current problem I’m facing is preventing access to the notification tray. Simply making the application full screen is not a solution. We do actually need to see the status bar. It’s the easiest way to provide network,gps and battery status information to the user.
So far my research has only turned up one solution, which is to go full screen (again, not a solution for this problem,I need the status bar to be visible). I know there’s a number of lock screen apps that are able to do this so there must be a way. I just haven’t found it yet.
I am not sure, but probably that you can’t just lock notification bar from the application level. Android app is isolated from the Operating System and another apps, so it is not able to lock OS features.
Solution that came into my head is to make app fullscreen and create Your own status bar with battery level, current time and network status. It is not hard.
Another solution would be to prepare Your own Android distribution 🙂
Moreover probably You would like to override all buttons (home, back, search) so user is not able to leave your app.