by snerual on 9/15/23, 1:45 PM with 10 comments
We develop a Chromebook kiosk app for exams used at 50+ universities in Europe. These universities use Chromebooks as cheap "exam laptops", sometimes in rooms of 1k+ students. They use Google Admin to configure all these machines.
Since last week, exams are getting cancelled, because just when the students are about to start their exam, IT notices their config is (partially) wiped again.
The wiping doesn't happen immediately, the config is actually saved correctly. It just gets deleted after a few days.
We reached out to Google Dev support to raise this issue. Google being Google responded that we "should contact the developers of the kiosk app"....that's us.
Thanks Google
(I mostly feel for all these students having studied hard for their exams and showed up in time, just for them to be send home again)
by crazygringo on 9/15/23, 2:46 PM
It doesn't seem to be a widespread problem, and how do you know it's not the universities themselves changing the configs automatically with some other software?
I'm sure you can reply to Google support again, and work with the universities to debug this, using their Google support as well. It might not be Google at all.
Just saying that a single support reply indicating that a rep misunderstood your request isn't uncommon. You still have a lot of steps to try to debug and solve this. I don't see how this is a Tell HN.
by stronglikedan on 9/15/23, 2:22 PM
by bbarnett on 9/15/23, 2:35 PM
Instead, it's that they have negative tech support. By negative, I mean that their support goes from "making the situation horriy worse" to "nothing".
by isilofi on 9/15/23, 2:38 PM
Otherwise, good luck getting Google to move in maybe a few years or so...
by sfmike on 9/15/23, 2:35 PM