I want to create an application, that runs in the background, and monitors the other running Apps.
Can you tell me, how do I know when an App acces to the GPS, so I can insert the name of the App and the time interval into a sqlite database?
how do I know when an App acces to the GPS
You don't, at least on a standard Android device. I cannot rule out the possibility of determining this on a rooted device or as a system app, though I am not aware of any specific options for those scenarios either.
Generally speaking, one app has no means to spy on the operations of another app. There are some specific exceptions to this, though they tend to get locked down over time.
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I'm developing an android application that has to get traffic statistics once a week. The problem is that if user reboots his device, the statistics will be reloaded and the app will not be able to get statistics just by subtraction current value with an previous one. I was wondering if there exists some kind of listener for that purpose.
There is unfortunately no such way to find out (in a foolproof manner) that the device is rebooting.
Compunded by the fact that reboot can take place in many ways (from the UI - which is a procedural shutdown of the Android runtime, or from the shell using the "reboot" command which is Linux userland level call) you probably won't have enough time to do anything in your app once the reboot sequence has started.
Architecturally, you should always be in a situation where in a random reboot should not make your app lose critical data - i.e. always periodically saving your analytics data to file in internal storage etc.
What I want to do is is there a very way to prevent user from turning off Mobile Data & Location services?
My scenario is this, I am creating a mobile application for a big project we have now. This application is restricted for the use of their employees going out of the field, now this phone by any means should not turn off mobile data and location services as I have an application service that sends constant location data to the administration API.
OR maybe an existing application that prevent native functions like this from being accessed. This may sound crazy but I just have thought if there is something like this.
Thank you!
I hope someone could enlighten me.
No, you can't do that.
Even if you could, it would not solve anything, because there are many other reasons why those services may not work. For example when one is driving through a tunnel and there is no signal or out of town there may sometimes be no signal or the network may be overloaded or something. So you can't rely on these services anyway. Intermittent loss of connectivity is pretty common in mobile devices. You will have to take it into account (log data and send them when you succeed in reconnecting).
If the users need the application, and connectivity in it, to do their job, they won't be turning it off, because they need it. So all that is needed is to create a notification when connectivity and/or location is lost so the user can do something about it if:
the application fails to connect when they turn it on at the start of their shift or
the application looses connection for extended period of time for whatever reason.
And of course if there is somebody in the company using the data (some dispatcher), which I suppose there is, they will notice the particular worker is not sending anything and will try to contact them by calling or something. These should take care of mistakes and faults.
If the users don't need it and it is intended to spy on them (so they may have a reason to disable it), it is probably illegal anyway.
You cannot prevent user from turning off Mobile data. But you can simple record location in a file with time while data is off and send it immediately after user turn on the data.
That is impossible unless the device is rooted.
And it makes perfect sense, because that would compromise the user's experience of Android and/or security.
You must anticipate circumstances like the user turning off the data or connection and act appropriately (for example gracefully stall your connections with the internet and resume them later, inform the user that his device has been disconnected from the internet and that your application requires internet access etc...).
I am a complete Android programming newbie.
I have completed some tutorial examples like HelloAndroid and the HelloViews/Layouts, but that is about the extent of my Android programming abilities.
I am not the programmer on this project, I am the tester(QA) for a company that is developing an Android application that will track company owned devices every 1 minute, and send the positions back once 5 or so are stored.(Limiting mobile network usage, to conserve battery.) My company bought and pays for the android devices, and the employees are aware they are being tracked, both for safety purposes of the employees as well as accountability. Behind making phone calls and some mild emailing, this is one of the most important functions/uses of our devices.
Our biggest problem is that our application can be killed at any time by the Android OS, for any number of reasons(device resources, etc.) Right now, we have an Android service that checks if our app is running every so often and if not, it starts it back up. Once our app is running it can be in the background and request positions using a service in the app itself, then send them to our server for processing and storage.
From everything I have read about Android Development practices, this does not seem to be the most Android "appropriate" way to do this. From what I can gather, and this is fairly limited, we should have an Android service that runs in the background and requests then sends positions, but even this can be killed without notice from the OS, right?
Any advice or suggestions anyone could provide that would point me in the right direction?
It might be worth mentioning that this will kill everyones battery extremely fast... but you pretty much have it right as far as the best way to do it. If the OS does kill your app in the background, your service can just restart it.
What are your concerns, that the OS will repeatedly kill it and not allow it to do its job?
Or that the GPS locations wont be accurate? Location.getAccuracy() could help you figure out if the location is worth saving
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Location.html
I'm developing an application on both the android and iPhone simultaneously. Due to the nature of my geolocation application, it's important that the information is really coming from a phone, and not just an emulator that happens to have the application installed.
Is there some kind of value I can pull from the device(s) to determine if its an emulator? I don't want users cheating the system by simply setting their own values for their lat/long coordinates. I know nothing is fool proof, but I would at least like eliminate as much fraud as possible.
I plan to have algorithms in place to validate data being recieved, such as jumping n. miles in n. seconds from your last location -- but this could cause false positives in some situations -- especially on some Androids, where you can magically be placed all over the world moving 2 feet.
This is applicable to both the Android and iOS. Answers for either phone would be fine.
You can use [UIDevice currentDevice].model to get the current device model for iOS. The UIDevice class reference will give you the possible constant strings which you can compare to. Scroll down to the model property for more info.
Don't have much experience with android, however this should work.
With Android, as it turns out, it's a bit more complicated than just determining whether or not you're on an emulator (which can be done using Peter's link above), given the ability, under "Development Settings" to allow Mock Locations (see, for example, this app that allows the user to set a mock location that will then be made available to other apps).
Depending upon the method you're using to retrieve the location provider (e.g., calling LocationManager.getProvider() using the return value from LocationManager.getBestProvider()) you could therefore end up using a Mock Provider. I've been unable to find any definitive method for determining whether a provider is Mock or not (e.g., there's no property of the LocationProvider that indicates it is Mock, no property of the Location that indicates it's fake, etc.). What you could, however, do is read the Secure Settings to determine whether or not ALLOW_MOCK_LOCATION is enabled and not allow your app to function in this case; since the setting is one of the Secure Settings, there is no way to change it programmatically.
I live near the border and work in another country. So I have selected my own network provider as the favorite. However, I notice that it sticks with the provider for as long as it can. So when I start from my country I keep my network even when I am across the border, however, when I go the other way around, it will keep the foreign network even when my favorite network is already available. I know this, because when I want to manually select it, it is available from the list.
Now, I would like to create an application that would automatically search for my preferred network when it is roaming, each time it connects to another cell tower.
Now I understand, that previously I could have listened to Cell Location changed with a broadcast receiver, but that is now impossible. (Which is a pity)
And I read from this:
Programatically connecting to another Network operators
That it seems that I would be unable to select another provider from an application for security reasons. (At least with documented api calls).
However, I don't care about public api or not, because I don't intent to distribute this in the Android Market. It is just an app to make MY life easier, will probably open up the source code, so other people can use it if they want to.
I could use some hints, to get this working though.
So maybe there are other things that are broadcast for which I can listen to, like signal strength or something, this would start my code to check if I can switch network.
I would prefer this to work as a Broadcast Receiver, I also have read that when using Cell location from a Service that I won't get updates when the screen is turned off, which in this case defeats the purpose.
And then, I would greatly appreciate some hints/pointers as for how to search the Android source for stuff that I can use to select the network automatically.
Since it sounds like you might be traveling on a predictable path between the networks, have you considered using the ProximityAlert capability of the LocationManager? You define a circle around some location, and when your device enters/exits that circle, a broadcast is issued to your receiver.
I wrote a section on this in Pro Android 3, chapter 17. There's a sample application on our web site:
http://www.androidbook.com/projects
Click on the link for the project zip files, then look for ProAndroid3_Ch17_Maps.zip
There are instructions for downloading and importing from the link above. The project inside the zip is called ProximityAlertDemo. It's very basic, just to show the Proximity Alert itself, but it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate it into an app or a service. I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you on how to switch the networks from code though. The suggestion to launch into the Settings screen seems to be your best bet at the moment.