What is a kiosk mode?
Guided Access vs. Single App Mode
There are two ways to do this. Guided Access is the quickest, easiest way to put an iPad in kiosk mode. Guided Access is often thought of as a parental control feature, but it’s actually intended for teachers in schools–that’s why it’s categorized as a “Learning” feature in Apple’s iOS.Guided Access allows you to temporarily lock an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch to a single app. To leave that app, someone will have to enter your PIN or provide your fingerprint.
There’s also Single App Mode, which is exactly what it sounds like: It fully locks your iPad to a single app. This is a more advanced feature intended for organizations. You’ll need to use Apple Configurator (or a mobile device management server) to enable this feature, and it can only be disabled with the same tool. However, you need to have access to a Mac to use Apple Configurator and Single App Mode.
If you need to set up a quick and dirty kiosk, Guided Access is an okay solution. But, if you want to do this properly, you should use Single App Mode. Single App Mode is a more secure solution because no one can attempt to guess your PIN to leave Single App Mode, as they can with Guided Access. More importantly, if someone resets the iPad by pressing and holding the “Sleep/Wake” and “Home” buttons at the same time, the iPad will boot back up into the app you configured. If you used Guided Access, it would just boot back up and ask you to sign in with your PIN. The iPad would remain secure–as long as someone can’t guess the PIN–but you’d have to sign in and manually enable Guided Access mode for that specific app again.
To do this with Guided Access, first enable it by opening the Settings app and going to General > Accessibility > Guided Access. Enable the “Guided Access” slider here.
Tap “Passcode Settings” to set a PIN for guided access and choose whether or not you can exit Guided Access with Touch ID, if your iPad has a Touch ID sensor. You can use the same PIN you use to unlock the iPad or a different one.
