*This post originally appeared on the Wavelink blog prior to the rebrand in January 2017, when Wavelink, LANDESK, Shavlik, AppSense, and HEAT Software merged under the new name Ivanti.

I’ll cover the why’s and how’s in more detail in a future post but what’s becoming clear is that the face of retail is changing. Mobile devices are becoming ever more prolific in our shopping experiences and consumerization of mobility has been a big driver. Retailers have looked at the experiences that consumer devices provide and are trying to leverage that to change the way we physically interact with their stores, or the way that their retail associates get their jobs done. One factor has been cost – the acquisition cost of a consumer device is much less than a comparable rugged device (note that I said ‘acquisition’ and not TCO). Up to this point, iOS devices have been the major winner in this space but, as many early adopters are finding out, there are many aspects of the experience that are out of their control.

Late last year, Apple released iOS 7 as we were reaching the end of our TE iOS 1.3 development cycle. Our engineering team had been validating each beta drop to ensure that everything worked as expected. Very late in the cycle it was discovered that Apple had changed their power management methods with regards to how backgrounded apps were treated. This change meant that any background app had a hard-coded 3 minutes until the OS closed the network sockets – this was detrimental to the TE experience, though we were able to solve the issue with ConnectPro. ConnectPro maintains TE sessions and allows clients to reconnect back to the point they were at prior to the failure.

The takeaway for us is that, even though it is expensive, it is worth our while to perform these proactive validation efforts so we can be prepared for Day 1 support of a new OS.  These often pass with few issues, though sometimes, like with iOS 7, we have some major work to do to deliver an enterprise solution. Look at is as a kind of insurance that we are providing on behalf of our customers.

Next week Apple is holding one of their events, where they are expected to announce the iPhone 6 and the release date for iOS 8. The Wavelink team has been validating each beta release to ensure that our clients still work as expected. We did find a couple of issues that needed to be resolved, and these fixes were included in the latest iOS TE v2 client release, however, nothing major has been found.

iOS TE customers have Day 1 support for iOS 8. Download the latest client from the Wavelink website https://www.wavelink.com/Apple-device-downloads.

The takeaway for you, our customer, is that, no matter which device OS you chose, Wavelink has you covered. We are doing the due diligence to ensure that our clients work on the latest platforms and that we continue to provide seamless support on a very wide variety of mobile platforms and devices.

Watch this space for future news of Day 1 Android L support.