My company has written an android driver app (for making deliveries) from which the driver can select a 'call' button to dial the customer they are delivering to. I know how to change the intent to auto dial the number instead of the user having to manually initiate the call but I would like to know if there is a way of somehow locking the dialler down in some way.
Best solutions would be to either a) ensure that the phone returns to the drivers app after the call hangs up, or b) disabling the number pad on the dialler so they cannot call any other numbers.
I have searched through the available dialler apps on play store to see if there was anything suitable but I could not find anything. I have searched the forums (which is how I found the ACTION.CALL intent) but not really found a solution yet.
The app is written with PHP and javascript.
Any suggestions would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance,
Ant.
Is this on their personal phone, or on a device you give them? If its a personal phone, no. If its a device you give them- what you really want is a kiosk app. You could install your own softphone that doesn't allow dialing (although you should probably add a 911 button for emergencies) and block the user from installing any other dialers via DeviceManager apis (you'd have to be the device owner, but as its a device you physically control that's no problem).
Of course doing kiosk mode is really diving through deep apis that almost nobody uses. I wouldn't recommend it without an android expert on your team.
Outisde of kiosk mode and a complete lockdown of your device- no there is no way. Because the dialer is just an app, there's no way to force it to have certain features.
Related
I'm looking to change notifications settings for a single application remotely.
I've got the device enrolled into a MDM.
Android device running 6.01.
I can remotely deploy / update apps etc...
However, I want to disable notifications for this. I can't seem to find a hands off approach to doing this.
I'd have to break out of the end user lock down application.
Go to settings
apps
find app
notifications
block
restart device.
Is there a way I can remotely make this change?
Thanks in advance.
you might have more luck asking your MDM provider but there is no way to achieve this from the platform. This is not a requirement I have heard before, typically enterprise devices are configured to block all notifications or allow all. If you do not plan on using the application in question you could likely disable the entire app remotely but being able to disable notifications for that specific app remotely is not currently possible.
The MDM provider said it was an OS behavior and needs to be suppressed from the OS. I got it sorted by disabling them the manual way.
I'm starting to research about Android Auto, I want to do my thesis on this.
I want to know if it is possible to obtain from the Android Auto certain information that is important for the thesis project, such as:
bluetooth connections,
phone connections (identifiers, contacts, call logs, SMS),
mass storage devices,
and navigation infomation.
It is a project whose objective is to help researchers obtain important information in court cases.
I will be very grateful any information you can provide to me.
Android Auto is really just another app, but enables a projected experience of the Android system to an Auto supported vehicle dashboard. Architecturally, what 3rd parties are allowed to build on is just a shell/template. The real activities etc are in the Android Auto process, and connected to the car.
When a 3rd party app is being shown, Android Auto just shuttles methods (onCreate, onResume, etc) back and forth between the processes. The information you’re asking about when used while Auto is connected would still be found through the mobile device and not independently within the Android Auto app itself.
I've just found an app that allows to disable Samsung apps without root, and in the background:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hecorat.packagedisabler
And also this free one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ospolice.packagedisabler
How could this be? It doesn't even show a system-type alertDialog to ask the user if it's ok to disable the app. Did they find a flaw that allows doing so?
Is it only for Some Samsung apps? What about other apps and other companies? Is is possible there too?
Could the same mechanism be used for other operations? Like enabling apps?
I currently don't have a Samsung device, so I can't even check this app.
You can hide or unhide the apps provided you make your app as device owner with the api setApplicationHidden of DevicePolicyManager
Your app needs to be the device owner of the device. In order to become a device owner, you either need to do an NFC configuration or adb command shell. You can find a very well written blog by Florent here.
However, there is a new method of getting your application to become a device owner starting with Android Marshmallow. With a lot of limitations though. You have to be an EMM provider and your client has to have a google business or edu licensing for this to work.
There is no application on the google play store that allows your app to become device admin. As a device owner you have a lot of things you can control on the device and hence, I believe Google may not want to provide this kind of control without proper safeguards.
With regards to Samsung Devices, they provide their knox sdk as mentioned with other answers here which gives you access to certain APIs that are not allowed via stock Android.
I'm not sure how to phrase the title of the question.
But the question is pretty simple, there is an app called openVpn for android (which allows a user to connect to vpn server).
I don't want the user to open the app when he want's to access my service, i want it to be seamless, meaning : when some app tries to access my service IP address, i want to catch that event, load openvpn and only then allow the user to access my service.
I wrote few android apps, but never something like this, where do i start ?
Is it possible to monitor where other apps are going (to which IP address) without rooting the device ?
Maybe some kind of driver ?
I searched around the web, and couldn't find anything helpful.
Thanks,
In a unrooted device, you shouldn't be able to monitor the connections made by other apps and in fact, you can't.
As an workaround, I guess you can just launch OpenVPN from you app (if OpenVPN registers itself for any Intent). So, the user doesn't have to remember about it.
Else, you have no more choice than integrating OpenVPN inside your app (the source code, I mean) or just telling your users that they have to launch it.
I'm currently doing some research about my project, a smartphone tracking native application, and I have four questions. Links to any material I can read up will be greatly appreciated, and the most useful/comprehensive response will be accepted.
The primary target smartphones are the Android, Blackberry and iPhone models.
For starters I found out here Uniquely Identify an Android Handset that IMEI can be used to uniquely identify Androids but I think I once read that it can be faked. I don't know about the iPhone and Blackberry.
What's the most reliable way to uniquely identify the smartphone device, if any? Can MAC addresses work or is it possible to spoof that? Can IMEIs truly be faked?
Is it possible to "lock" the device with a custom error message remotely via its unique identification, once the device is reported as stolen? This lock state will remain on the phone even when disconnected from the network, until it is reconnected to the network and unlocked remotely once again.
Assuming such a remote phone lock is possible, can such be reversible by the thief? The native app will run in stealth mode so that it cannot be uninstalled.
Can a cross-platform solution work in this case, or will I have to develop various native apps per platform?
EDIT:
Some more context. As Till rightly said, Apple's "Find my Phone" does this exact thing already (I am just finding out about it, but it looks like a perfect fit already). The user who is choosing to install the app is informed that the phone will be uniquely identified if they do install the app. As for locking the device, "Find my Phone" does it (I gather). Now I need to know how that might be possible on the two other platforms.
With regards the iPhone side of things:
You aren't allowed to uniquely identify the iPhone like that. Apple have just forbidden it unless you get the user's permission first. So if they refuse you permission, your app won't function and you'll need to find another way.
No, you can't do that.
See 2. Also you can't run an app in "stealth mode"
See 2.
Only the network operators can talk to the handsets on an IMEI level. The IMEI number IS the MAC address of GSM networks. However, you can't access that unless you have control of the network. Sure you can get the IMEI from the user, but you can't use that to locate the phone. On CDMA networks this address is called the MEID number.
But there are other ways:
You can get location data on either platform with the users' permission. This is the way you should think about developing your application. You'll want to assign a UUID to a user once they download and install your application on their phones. You can then have the phones report to a server every so often (heartbeat). As long as the phone is powered on and connected to a network, the user would be able to locate the phone.
You can also get the phones IP address on the network, among other things -- such as contacts, messages, files, cache data etc..
On Android it's pretty easy to implement this kind of functionality as a service that could would only be visible on the packages page. Further, if you have root access, you can write whatever kind of rootkit you want such that it hides itself from the system. Same with a jailbroken iPhone. I am not as knowledgeabe about iPhone services though.
Either way, the only cross platform compatibility you'd be able to exploit would be perhaps the way data is sent and received from the server. You could use some standard such as JSON to send and receive data (and hence the same server). Although, both platforms have JSON and Apache libraries, the other parts of the apps or services themselves will need to be completely and dependently developed for each platform (UI, Internal Content Handeling, Syscalls, Permissions, etc).
You can remotely lock, wipe, factory reset, etc. Android devices using the security and device administration Android system interface. This still requires the user to grant permission and it asks them an a more.. obnoxious.. way so that they know what exactly they are agreeing to when they give an app device administration permission. If you ever use an exchange server for business or school, it's likely you'll run into this.
I am unsure about remote iPhone device administration on a jailed system.
If you really want something that can't be removed lest you do a factory reset, you'll need to know a thing or two about Unix programming, and a lot about the operating systems that their respective SDK's don't (and probably shouldn't) tell you. You'll need to be comfortable poking around sources and even reverse engineering if called for. If you're still interested, you'll want to hang around the circles that work on custom phone firmware and software for the iPhone, and Android (and Blackberry). I would start with Android. It's probably the easiest since the sources for the AOSP are easily and legally available.