Nearly 9 in 10 Devices Arrive Without Working Data Configuration

Enrollment baselines from roughly 90,000 newly observed Android devices in Mexico show how often out-of-box carrier configuration is wrong, and how fast it gets corrected when the SIM can fix it.

Carrier configuration fails at two points in a device's life: at arrival, when out-of-box settings do not match the network the device joins, and over time, as working configuration drifts. This report measures the first: the state devices are actually in when they enroll.

When a device enrolls, SDKCX records a baseline of its carrier configuration exactly as found, before anything is corrected. Between July 2025 and June 2026 we captured enrollment baselines from roughly 90,000 newly observed Android devices in Mexico. Those baselines answer a question operators usually cannot: what share of devices start life misconfigured.

Finding 1: the internet APN is almost never right out of the box

Of devices with an enrollment baseline for the internet APN, 87.7 percent arrived without it correctly configured. This is not an anomaly, it is the structural reality of the MVNO model: a device built and shipped globally has no reason to carry the correct APN profile for the network it eventually joins. Every one of those devices, left alone, is a subscriber whose data does not work on day one, and a likely first-week support contact or a silent churn.

Finding 2: voice configuration gaps are smaller but not rare

At arrival, 17.4 percent of baselined devices lacked their IMS APN configuration and 4.0 percent had VoLTE disabled. Another 5.9 percent arrived locked in manual network selection mode instead of automatic, a state that degrades service quality whenever the selected network is not the best available one.

Finding 3: the gap closes in minutes when the SIM can fix it

Because SDKCX operates with Android Carrier Privileges and every configuration write is attributed in our telemetry, we can report correction rates with no inference. Of devices that arrived without their internet APN configured, 94.3 percent were corrected automatically, with a median correction time of under a minute from enrollment and 88.7 percent corrected within the first hour. Corrections reached 87.9 percent for IMS configuration, 90.2 percent for devices in manual network selection, and 95.8 percent for disabled VoLTE. Across the full fleet, the deterministic remediation engine executed over two million automatic configuration corrections in twelve months. No AI sits in that decision path: corrections are rule-based validations of device state against the expected operator profile.

Not everything can be fixed silently, and that is by design

29.1 percent of devices arrived with data roaming disabled. Unlike APN or VoLTE configuration, roaming is a setting Android reserves for user consent: it cannot and should not be switched on silently. For these devices the platform detects the state and guides the subscriber through enabling it. Of devices arriving with roaming off, 69.3 percent had it enabled afterward, with a median time of one hour, a large share of them through the platform's guided assistance flows. The distinction matters: automatic correction where the platform has authority, guided resolution where the user must decide.

A note on mobile data, and respecting the user

23.0 percent of devices arrived with mobile data switched off. This is corrected exactly once, at enrollment, because a new SIM with data disabled is almost always an oversight rather than a choice. After that first correction, if the user turns mobile data off again, that decision is respected and never overridden. Remediation exists to fix broken configuration, not to fight user intent.

About the data

Arrival states come from enrollment baselines recorded before any correction, expressed as a share of devices baselined for each parameter. Correction figures cover only changes explicitly attributed to the automatic remediation engine in device telemetry. All figures are from deduplicated, validated events between July 2025 and June 2026.

The lifecycle, measured end to end

Most devices arrive misconfigured, and configuration continues to drift throughout their life, a problem we have measured separately. Both failures are only visible, and fixable, at the device layer. Probe-based and crowdsourced measurement, whatever its scale, ends where this data begins.