SkieWhat is the Skie presence alarm that runs about every 4 minutes?
It is a repeating Android alarm that makes the Skie device report that it is alive about every 4 minutes. It is separate from the full sync. Its job is to tell the dashboard the device is still running and reachable, so a quiet device can be told apart from a broken one.
A full sync fetches rules, applies them and reads back every protection. That is useful work but it does not need to happen every few minutes. A light presence report does a different job: it says this device is switched on, the Skie app is running and the network path works.
Skie schedules this as a repeating alarm of about every 4 minutes. Android alarms are handled by the system, so the report continues even when the Skie app has not been in the foreground. The last-seen time on the dashboard is built from these reports and from full syncs.
Why it matters to an admin: without a presence signal, a tablet in a drawer and a tablet whose protections have been tampered with look the same, silent. With it, the dashboard can show that a device was seen a few minutes ago, or that nothing has arrived for long enough to move it into Due, Overdue or Offline unusual. A missing check-in is also treated as a breach, and the thresholds are yours to edit.
The alarm is one layer among several. The background service, a watchdog worker that restarts it, the battery optimisation exemption and instant sync on reconnect all back each other up. If one is delayed by the phone's power management, another picks up.
Practical tip: the 4 minute figure is a design rhythm, not a promise that every device reports to the minute. Judge health by the states on the dashboard rather than by counting minutes.