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My company makes industrial manufacturing products and we ship Android tablets with an app to control a manufacturing process. Ideally this should be the only app the user sees, and we've been able to do this on handheld devices running Gingerbread but on Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich the system bar prevents this.

My understanding is that on Jelly Bean there is more programmatic control over the appearance of the System Bar but I'm unclear on the details. I read http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.html but it still wasn't clear to me whether there was any way to actually hide the system bar under programmatic control.

We're too small a company to make our own ROM (I'm the only Android developer) so we're trying to work with the stock version of the OS.

Thanks in advance.

dilara ates
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user316117
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1 Answers1

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it still wasn't clear to me whether there was any way to actually hide the system bar under programmatic control

Not permanently. The JB options to remove the system bar on a tablet only do so temporarily -- any user input will cause the bar to reappear. Hence, it is unsuitable for your scenario.

We're too small a company to make our own ROM

If you don't mind my asking, did you hunt for a consultant or firm to do this and not find anyone (or anyone suitable)? Or did you not pursue that angle? A custom ROM, or at least a root-change-unroot process, would be the right solution for your problem. I can certainly see where hiring a full-time ROM slinger might be overkill, but one hopes that there are ways of outsourcing that work.

CommonsWare
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  • We've though about hiring an outside consultant, but I talked to Romain Guy at AnDevConIII in may and he said he hoped maybe some commercial 3rd-party ROMs might become available because there is a lot of unmet demand in the kiosk space. Personally, I don't know how to begin to look for such a consultant/contractor but that sounds like a good idea. – user316117 Aug 14 '12 at 17:50
  • @user316117: Oh, I am in complete agreement with Romain on that point. However, potential future services won't solve present needs. – CommonsWare Aug 14 '12 at 18:34