SkieCan students use airplane mode to avoid Skie on a school tablet?
No. Skie locks airplane mode with Android's airplane mode restriction, and it is on by default. The toggle cannot be turned on, so a student cannot cut the radios to hide a tablet from location checks or from a policy sync. Rules that are cached on the device keep working in any case.
Airplane mode switches off mobile, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios in one tap. For a student, it can look like a clever way to go quiet: no sync, no location update, no filtered web. Skie closes that door at the Android level.
The DISALLOW_AIRPLANE_MODE restriction is set by Skie as the device owner on Android 9 and newer, which covers every device Skie supports. The tile in the quick settings panel and the switch in Settings cannot be used to turn airplane mode on.
Two other things matter. First, rules are cached on the device and keep working offline, so even without a connection the app lists, schedules and protections still apply. Second, a device that goes quiet for any reason moves through the Due, Overdue and Offline unusual states and, past your Breach threshold, appears in the breach centre. Those thresholds are editable.
The protection is default on and has its own switch in the hardening section. It is read back from Android after every apply and counted in the compliance score. A fair question from teachers is whether airplane mode is ever needed, for instance on a flight for a school trip. In that case, an admin can turn the switch off for that group for the duration.
Practical tip: for exam sessions, pair this with a schedule so that the exam app set is the only one available while the radios stay on and the device keeps reporting.