After a terminal receives any piece of control information sent by a management server, if the control information is used to indicate that a foreground operating system of the terminal is a target operating system, the terminal is controlled according to a control instruction carried in the control information. When the foreground operating system of the terminal is not the target operating system, the terminal does not control the terminal according to the control instruction. In addition, the terminal may store a correspondence between a system identifier of the target operating system and the control instruction, so that after the foreground operating system of the terminal is changed to the target operating system, the terminal may further obtain the control instruction based on the correspondence and control the terminal according to the control instruction.