I got a small project. Company will provide android phones to their employees and company do not want them to access camera and shut down their phone and also they should not be able to disable GPS or Mobile data.
I'm new to android development. Would you please tell me if this is possible. Few reference on how to do that (If possible) :).
Thank you so much for your help.
Nothing will stop them from shutting down their phones. If nothing else they can always remove the battery.
Some of the other stuff can be done via Device Owner permissions and android's device policy manager, which is made for enterprise control of devices.
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.
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.
Some background information:
I have a certain yet to be released tablet and sadly the people who designed it seemed to have removed TelephonyProvider.apk
Here's how I've reached that conclusion :
When I go to More... in WIRELESS & NETWORKS there are no options to change APN, VPN or access Mobile networks. (Please note that the table has no facility to lodge a SIM card) However, on my Karbonn ST10 (Android 4.1.1) all these options are found. The certain tablet is currently on Android 4.2.2
When I used an app called APN shortcuts I was able to launch the APN configuration screen, however every time I changed the MCC or MNC number, the APN could not be saved and was deleted.
When I tried to read the contents of content://telephony/carriers I received a NullPointerException.
Questions:
What is the purpose of TelephonyProvider.apk?
Will it be possible to install it without root access? If so, how? (I'm pretty sure this can't be done, but if someone else knows a magical method please enlighten the world)
Can 3G data connections via dongles be established on this device which seems to be missing TelephonyProvider? Or will the ROM have to be edited and TelephonyProvider be installed.
I'm pretty sure this is a programming question, but if it belongs on Android Enthusiasts, please move it.
It's just an apk... you should be able to sideload it with adb without root with adb sideload <your apk>. It would just be removable since its not it /system/app, ie built in with the ROM. If the makers of your device disabled certain features on the device, which would explain possibly why those menus do not display in the Settings app, then TelephonyProvider may not be all that you need to get the connections you want to establish working.
Hope this helps.
Update:
These features are probably disabled on the device you are using. based on what you described.
From the PackageManager documentation.
FEATURE_TELEPHONY Feature for getSystemAvailableFeatures() and hasSystemFeature(String): The device has a telephony radio with data communication support.
FEATURE_WIFI Feature for getSystemAvailableFeatures() and hasSystemFeature(String): The device supports WiFi (802.11) networking.
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.
I was reading this
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/bluetooth.html#QueryingPairedDevices
which is allot of help on how to pair,connect to a bluetooth device.
I have a situation where I have several BT devices that are in Non-Discover mode always. I know the MAC and the PIN of these devices. IS there a way in Android Dev to manually add devices to the PAIRED list so i can just use the connect as a client.
I understand this maual is written allot for V3. i think i will need to do this on 2.0 ; 2.1- has anybody done this before?
Basically these devices I want to connect to are power saving modules I used pre built BT modules to monitor daylight, another one humidity, etc.. every 3hrs or when interrupted and runs of a single battery for months. So turning off divcory on server saves immense power and prevents other people trying to connect and waste battery.
Not sure what you mean by "manually": Do you mean "manually" as in GUI/user interaction, or "manually" as "I do it in my own application code"?
Some suggestions though:
If you can make your BT devices discoverable at all, you could do it this way:
Make your BT device discoverable
Let Android search for and find the device and then initiate a connection
Android will ask for the PIN for pairing with the device; enter the PIN.
Once pairing was successful, Android stores the pairing information for future use, so that you can
Make your BT device invisible again.
From then on your app should be able to connect to the BT device at any time without further pairing operations.
If the said is not an option for you, maybe you want to go another way:
In current Android versions there are different API routines implemented which are neither documented nor exposed in the normal SDK. A hack kind of solution may be to use some of these "hidden" ("#hide"...) APIs, either via reflection or via modification of your SDK installation.
But be aware that this is always a hack and it may work on a specific device with a specific version of Android and is likely to break your app on another device and/or any other Android version.
Having said that, here comes some reference:
Example of how to access "hidden" bluetooth API.
Then, have a look at the source code for android.bluetooth.BluetoothDevice, e.g. here.
In there, public boolean createBond(){...} may do what you want.