Tell HN: Google randomly deleting Chromebook configs

The Google Admin Console is randomly un-setting configs for managed Chromebooks.

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)

Nope, we don't have write access to the config. It's manually configured by the universities through the admin console. We first through some admin deleted the config by mistake, but then it started happening for multiple universities.

It's not the poorly thought out dev work that Google does, which is the problem. Lots of firms are like that.

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".

Definitions of "supported" vary widely. It can mean anything between "you get some updates" and "we'll fix bugs and even implement new features you ask for".

Because this is the only place to actually get any support from Google, instead of just canned responses from a chat bot