Work Profile (Shelter) causes soft-reboot

When I try to setup a sandboxing app (eg Shelter, Insular etc) it causes the phone to soft-reboot, then when I try to set it up again, it says the setup failed due to existing Work Profile or a heavily modified system. Then when I check the account, it shows the same app already having a Work Profile: (notice it doesn’t show two profilesl categories on top like it would normally)

And when I remove it and set it up again, same thing happens. I tried to tweak settings and give admin permissions and so on, but nothing worked.

However, I managed to somehow make it work by using Test DPC, which successfully created a work profile, so I removed it and immediately used Shelter which was also successfully setup. It worked fine for couple of days – I even froze Work Profile apps couple of times and tried different features – then suddenly when I froze it again today and reactivated it, the phone started soft-rebooting in a loop. I had 2 seconds only to freeze the apps again from the bar options to stop it. So I was back to square one but worse.

I then realised I’ve been using iodeos 3.5 (iirc) and there was already a new update 4.1 – I have been using iodeos for a little over a week. So I thought installing it will solve the issue, but it didn’t. Then I reset my phone from recovery hoping that’d fix it also, but same problem of soft-reboot.

I could use the same trick probably but it’s an unstable solution and I’d be required to remove the Work Profile, thereby deleting all data in it, since I can’t open the Shelter app when it’s frozen.

I hope someone can help me, as this ROM is my only option for privacy as a Samsung Note9 user, and I really like it so far – thanks to the devs.

[UPDATE] Funnily, I tried to setup TestDPC again and it caused the phone to soft-reboot… I guess this trick is off the table.

[2.UPDATE] I flashed latest recovery.img and through it installed the latest OS update again, but it didn’t fix it. I also tried to manually set up Insular with adb tools and Mainland but it resulted in weird settings – it was impractical. I guess I’ll just use the browser and foss front-ends instead.

it cannot be a general issue with iodéOS because i use shelter on a pix5, 6 and mi10lite without issues on iodéOS 3.5 and 4.x
Never had any problems

Maybe insular could be an alternative:

I’ve tried Insular as well, and same issue.

[UPDATE] Funnily, I tried to setup TestDPC again and it caused the phone to soft-reboot… I guess this trick is off the table.

[2.UPDATE] I flashed latest recovery.img and through it installed the latest OS update again, but it didn’t fix it. I also tried to manually set up Insular with adb tools and Mainland but it resulted in weird settings – it was impractical. I guess I’ll just use the browser and foss front-ends instead.

Effectively there’s an issue here that seems specific to Samsung 9 series, even on the latest beta which uses the LineageOS device tree. From the logs it is related to screen locking. As a temporary workaround you can disable screen locking, configure Shelter, then reenable screen locking.

Wow, it worked! Now that I think about it, I may have removed my lockscreen last time it worked, since I was tinkering with work profile locker, but instead I attributed the solution to TestDPC which coincidentally worked. Thank you, so much, Vince!

Hello, at the moment I’m also stuck in this soft reboot (1-2 seconds), while accidentally activating the work profile. Is there any chance to get out of this loop without losing data?