Accessing and using Microsoft Teams on smartphones and tablets across platforms
This may or may not be useful to anyone but I'll put all my thoughts on this in one place here.
I've noticed that when Teams is doing it's 'refresh' antics it's actually Authenticator briefly popping up - but whatever it's trying to do is failing. One thing I haven't tested is disabling the 'mobile data always active' in developer mode settings. I believe that's the default mode of Android phones, and I'll test with it disabled today. Some general things I've tested/noticed, etc. -
- I'm on Android 11 on a Google Pixel 4a, latest patches installed.
- I'm not enrolled in InTune or any other MDM.
- I have Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, the usual Word/Excel apps, and Authenticator. The work account I'm having trouble with does require MFA.
- I have an Office 365 Family account configured in Teams/Outlook/Authenticator on the same device and they all work perfectly even on WiFi. I even have MFA turned on. This only affects my work accounts, even though it's the same device and the same apps.
- Everything works perfectly if I turn off WiFi, but the cell coverage at my home is garbage and I rely on WiFi even for voice calls.
- The Authenticator beta seemed to fix the issue at first, but within an hour it was doing it again. I'm still on the beta version and experiencing these issues as badly as I was before the upgrade.
- When Teams is acting up, I notice that when I get new emails in Outlook I can see the notification but if I go into the inbox there's nothing there. If I turn off WiFi and wait 30 seconds it starts working normally again.
- I've tested on multiple WiFi networks, including the company's internal WiFi where MFA is normally bypassed due to being on the same network as our ADFS cluster. I was sure this would yield a different results, but the problem still happened.
- Any of the previously proposed solutions are at best a temporary fix, and within an hour the problem always returns on my device.
- I've completely uninstalled/reinstalled all affected apps.
- I've rebooted my phone.
- I've cleared cache/local storage for Teams - but when I have to sign in on next launch it fails with the network error others have reported if I'm connected to WiFi.
- Microsoft's statement on this issue attempts to blame this on poor quality WiFi, which is absolutely false.