Remote debugging: Not getting console from App when in kiosk mode

[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

Has anything changed recently with regards to remote debugging an app?
We've got our devices set up to SSH, and when we are running our app on a device that's not in kiosk mode (or just in a browser), we get the console output in the dev tools as expected.
However, in kiosk mode we don't get anything.

We did do a major rewrite at some point which may have (likely) caused this, but I'm not sure why everything works as expected until the app's in kiosk mode.

[Sonny Rao]

Not sure why kiosk mode changes anything w.r.t . debugging?

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[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

I'm not sure either, I was hoping there might be an obvious link that I didn't know about but I guess maybe not?
I just know that all of the tabs in DevTools are empty when the app runs in kiosk mode, and works as intended in browser or as an app on a device that's logged in to a user.

[Sonny Rao]

I'm not an expert in Chrome -- you may want to ask this question on
chromium-dev since it's mostly about Chrome

but I poked around and in the code and found something in
chrome/browser/devtools/devtools_window.c
that disables the UI aspect of it for kiosk mode and pointed at
https://crbug.com/514551

to me that seems to indicate that the UI stuff is disabled, but
doesn't say anything about the remote debugging so it seems like it
should work.

[Ben Wells]

+Drew Wilson whose team looks after kiosk

[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

If it helps at all, when we head to the application tab, our address is "//:" for some reason when looking at the "clear storage" section

[Drew Wilson]

Trying from the correct email address this time...

I suspect this is due to the new DeveloperToolsAvailability policy - it is intended to prevent users from using DevTools to interfere with force-installed apps and extensions, but I suspect this may also be impacting remote debugging of kiosk apps.

You will want to change this policy:

to "always allow use of built-in developer tools".

+Max Kirsch in case we want to change the default value of this policy for kiosk sessions.

[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

Thanks for the having a look!
I've changed that setting (a couple of hours ago now), but still no luck. Could it still be taking a while to propagate to the devices? 
I've noticed now too that when using the devtools to look at our service worker, we're getting console output there (and the path under application is correct).

[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

I logged into the device today and checked under Chrome://policy, and it looks like the policy isn't being pushed to the device? Unless I'm misunderstanding.
I set the user policy:

and this is what I see when I log into the device, open up Chrome and go to chrome://policy:

[jo...@telemetrytv.com]

Today I put the changes into public kiosk users, as well as root org users and the policy shows up now when I log into the device. However, still no logs from our app in kiosk mode.

[Aaron J Spetner]

I cannot find this DeveloperToolsAvailability policy for kiosk mode. I see it under "user and browser settings" and "managed guest session settings", but it does not appear under "device settings" and whenever I try to inspect the kiosk app, the dev tools are blank. I can inspect the login screen, but not the kiosk app. How can we debug our app? Why is the documentation so sparse?

[Aaron J Spetner]

After two weeks of searching and tinkering, it does not appear that this policy setting is available anywhere in the Management Console. However, I just found that you can override it by adding --force-devtools-available to /etc/chrome_dev.conf.