Access WiFi settings without leaving Single App Mode?

My limited understanding is that the best way would be to use a MDM solution.

If you're purchasing the iPads - you can buy them from Apple and use DEP to have them automatically connect to a MDM server and configure themselves on firstboot. I believe you can control what options a user sees during the setup assistant- which can include connecting to Wi-FI.

The other option would be to let the user perform a BYOD type deployment. So they could take any iPad - connect to Wifi and then signup with your MDM. That could then put the device into Single User Mode

A few links

https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM-Protocol-Reference.pdf

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement

There are a few opensouce MDM solutions and a bunch of paid ones.... I've used MicroMDM - but it's non trivial and depending on your use case might best to pay for the service

https://micromdm.io

The folks in various MDM groups in https://macadmins.herokuapp.com/ are super helpful too.

An implementation approach you have at your disposal is to use NEHotspotConfiguration to connect the application to the user's Wi-Fi network. This would require developing functionality for the user to input the SSID and Passphrase, but the very basics would looks like this:

var networkHotspotConfig: NEHotspotConfiguration?
// Add the user input ssidName and passphrase.
networkHotspotConfig = NEHotspotConfiguration(ssid: ssidName, passphrase: passphrase, isWEP: false)


if let unwrappedNetworkHotspot = self.networkHotspotConfig {
    NEHotspotConfigurationManager.shared.apply(unwrappedNetworkHotspot) { [weak self] (error) in
    // Check for error and act upon active connection.
    }
}

Matt Eaton

DTS Engineering, CoreOS

meaton3 at apple.com

The device would need to be online anyways to receive any MDM policies. If the device is in single app mode and needs to switch network, unfortunately it will more than likely need to be reset via iTunes