Sophos Mobile Security Version 5.5 Release Notes

New in this release

Better Performance

The overall scanning performance has been improved.

New Managed mode (Sophos Cloud Mobile Security)

Sophos Mobile Security can now also be managed through Sophos Cloud (will be released soon).

Improved user experience for scanning results

The results of all scans are now displayed in one place - no matter whether they resulted from a manual scan, an on-install scan or any other scan.

System requirements

Sophos Mobile Security runs on ARMv7 and x86 architecture based smartphones and tablets with Android version 4.0.3 and higher.

Installation

The application is installed through Google Play.

Known issues

Sending log or trace files through Google Mail

The user can send log as well as trace files to Sophos Support by email. For some Android versions the files are not sent with the email by the Gmail client although they have been attached by Sophos Mobile Security. Please use a different email client than Gmail when sending log or trace files.

Android Backup Service limitations on some devices

The overall use of the Android Backup Service is limited on some devices due to issues with device/vendor-specific implementations. These issues result in generally not restoring any application settings from the Android Backup Service. Therefore, the Sophos Mobile Security settings are not restored either when re-installing Sophos Mobile Security on such a device or installing Sophos Mobile Security on an additional device using the same Google account.

Android devices without the capability to send SMS

Some Android devices (for example Motorola Xoom, Android 3.2, Build Number: H.6.5.17.1) do not have the capability to send SMS although they can receive SMS. For these devices, Sophos Mobile Security is not able to send a confirmation SMS after executing a remote command. Furthermore, the Loss & Theft features Remote unlock and Locate at low battery do not work as they rely on the capability to send SMS.

Loss & Theft: Recovering of directory names and file names after wiping the SD card

The Android operating system allows only very limited access to the SD card and its contents. Therefore, the names of directories and files on the SD card may be recoverable using forensic/undelete tools. However, the file contents of the SD card always get wiped depending on the user's settings.

Spam Protection: Quick SMS response dialog appears when a call is blocked

On some older Android versions, Motorola modified the phone app in a way that the quick SMS response dialog pops up when a call is rejected.
This dialog disappears after 20 seconds when no action takes place. Due to Android restrictions SMSec cannot prevent this misbehavior.
On newer Motorola Android devices ( > 4.0) this problem does not occur anymore.

Web Filtering works only for specific browsers

Due to the architecture of the Android operating systems, web filtering within Sophos Mobile Security only works for the following browsers:

SMS Spam filtering not working anymore on devices with Android version 4.4 or higher

Due to a change of handling SMS in the Android operating system, the Spam filtering is not working anymore and therefore is deactivated on Android devices with OS version 4.4 and above. With Android 4.4 a default SMS app can be defined that exclusively receives / sends SMS on behalf of all other SMS apps. In addition, on some devices (e.g. the Google Nexus 5) Hangouts is the default SMS app and requests to be the standard SMS app every start. Therefore, it is very unlikely that the user would select Sophos Mobile Security as default SMS app. Thus, the feature is deactivated for Android 4.4+ devices.

Technical support

You can find technical support for Sophos Mobile Security solely by:

Information for Sophos Mobile Security 5.5 in managed mode

Note: The information in this section does not apply to the free version that can be downloaded from Google Play and is operated in un-managed mode by default. Operating Sophos Mobile Security in managed mode can either be done with Sophos Mobile Control or Sophos Cloud:

Installation

The application can be installed through Google Play. Alternatively, customers can download the application from MySophos and manually install the application on the devices.

New in this release for managed mode

With this release, the app can be managed by Sophos Cloud.

Other issues for managed mode

Updating from old version in managed mode

During an update from an old version the user may experience an ANR (Application Not Responding) dialog during the first start of Sophos Mobile Security. This results from a high workload caused by an internal data update of Sophos Mobile Security. The user has to ignore the ANR and Sophos Mobile Security will continue to operate as expected.

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