Google introduced a new feature in Android Lollipop release, which allows the applications to become corporate network friendly. They call it the Android for work. In a way now with new Android(5.o) release, big organizations can support the BYOD (Bring your own device) concept. As Android apps for work can put an end to corporate data breach. Android for work, is engineered in a way, where organizations can impose various forms restrictions on a device. Although a similar concept was available in the older APIs as well through DevicePolicyManager class. But now Android is backed up by Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), through which various security policies can be enforced on devices, dynamically.

To implement Android for work, three things are required:

1. Develop or modify an application to support Android for work.
2. Develop a work policy controller app to enforce restrictions on device.
3. Partner with an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution company.

To develop an application which supports Android for work, first you need to make a managed profile on the device. A managed profile is nothing but a separate profile of your user on the android device. The only difference is, permissions for this profile is managed through the work policy controller app; which is controlled by EMM software.

Now the question is how to provision a managed profile? This is done by sending an intent with ACTION_PROVISION_MANAGED_PROFILE. When the provisioning is complete onProfileProvisioningComplete method of DeviceAdminReceiver is called. Here we can enable this profile by calling setProfileEnabled() method. After a device is provisioned with a manged profile, it is imposed with restrictions defined by the work policy controller.

Usually when a device has a managed profile, the restrictions are categorized broadly in three ways:

1) Intent restrictions

Yes the most basic thing Intents, can be restricted on a managed profile. EMMs can impose such restrictions on a device, that if an intent is fired from a profile. It cannot cross that profile and go to an other profile or to the main owner profile. This is one of the most powerful restriction, that can be imposed on a device. There can be many situations where these sort of restrictions will come in handy. For e.g. restricting the user from launching a messaging app, or sharing a link from email to Facebook.

This brings a new area of development for existing apps. According to a basic concept of Android for work, your app may crash when an intent is fired and it is not handled in the profile itself. To make your app, Android for work friendly you may need to put on some checks. Like can the intent which is about to be fired, will be handled? or not? If not you can show a toast message.

2) System app restrictions

Work Policy controller app can also impose restrictions on system apps. Being an admin you can restrict a device from using system apps on a managed profile.

The interesting point for app developers is, when system apps are not present some of the very basic android functionality would be missing. Therefore whenever an intent is fired, it becomes necessary for them to check whether it could be handled.

3) File path restrictions

When work policies are imposed on a device, they also limit the other profiles to access managed profile’s data files. As when a new managed profile is created a different storage area is allocated to it, making files on that area secure from other profiles. If you try and share a file URI to some other profile it would not work.

If you need to share a file across the profiles, you may need to modify your app to support Android for work. To share files across the managed profiles content URIs could be used. Android content URIs are basically file paths through which we can share content in a secure way. When sharing a content URI, it not only provides a file path but also an authority to access that file. Through which files could be accessed outside the profile.

With this I would like to conclude by saying Android has evolved allot since its conception. No body could have thought that one day we would have this much of power in our hands. Recently released Android for work makes this OS even more secure and scalable for large organizations through the usage of EMMs. In recent future we may see all the organizations using Android for work, supporting BYOD.

Mohit Gupt

Born in New Delhi, India. A software engineer by profession, an android enthusiast and mobile development evangelist. My motive here is to create a group of skilled engineers, who can build better software. Reason being programming is my passion, and also it feels good to make a device do something you want. Professionally I have worked with many software engineering and product development firms. As of now too, I am employed as a senior engineer in a leading tech company. In total I may have worked on more than 20 projects professionally, but whenever I get spare time I share my thoughts here at Truiton.

www.truiton.com

The post How To Develop An Android App For Work appeared first on Truiton.

The latest buzz around the geek world apart from FIFA 14 world cup is the Google I/O 14. As you may know Google I/O is the annual developers conference held in San Fransisco, California. This dev con is being held on 25-26 June,14. To engage more attendees around the world Google has released an official app for Google I/O 14. I had some spare time so went through the app, and found that is has some real power packed features.

The first thing which anyone would see in this app would be the launch screen where all the events are listed in a grid sort of layout, which has its own Google sort of look and feel. If you don’t know what I mean have a look at the image below.

From this screen you can tap on any of the items and open a detailed popup window for that item. Being a developer I must say all the widgets, layouts or components used in this Google I/O 14 app are pretty neat and clean. What I am trying to say here is that nothing new or out of the box thinking is applied in this app, but still from an end users perspective its a great app. As it has great amounts of power packed stuff in it.

For e.g. Google I/O 14 app uses the Indoor Maps feature of Google Maps API v2. This allows the user to view the indoor maps of a building for each floor. In this app user can navigate to the maps section by two ways. First by swiping from left to right which opens a navigation drawer and then selecting the maps item from there. Second by tapping on top context menu maps button in the details popup event item.

Indoor maps is a new feature in Google Maps, this allows user to view the insides of a building. Its just like from Batman or Mission Impossible movie. The interesting part is that its real now and its used very smartly in this app. In the Google I/O 2014  Android app if you tap on maps from any event it directly points you to the location of that event on the map, so you can plan your way to it. A next level feature could have been the direction to it, but hey something is always left for a 2.0.

Other than this Google I/O 14 app has the standard features like maintaining a schedule, hash tagging on social networks like Google+.

More things that you can do with this app is sync your schedule with Google calender so that you don’t miss it.

Although all of this sums up to be great but to my dismay this app has one annoying bug as well, this app keeps on closing on going back. For e.g. if you go from All Sessions screen to My Schedule screen and press the back you are thrown out of app. Hope its improved in the next version. Apart from this its still a very useful app therefore if you are going to the Google I/O 14 don’t forget to download it from Google Play.

Mohit Gupt

Born in New Delhi, India. A software engineer by profession, an android enthusiast and mobile development evangelist. My motive here is to create a group of skilled engineers, who can build better software. Reason being programming is my passion, and also it feels good to make a device do something you want. Professionally I have worked with many software engineering and product development firms. As of now too, I am employed as a senior engineer in a leading tech company. In total I may have worked on more than 20 projects professionally, but whenever I get spare time I share my thoughts here at Truiton.

www.truiton.com

The post Google I/O 2014 Official Android App Review appeared first on Truiton.

All of you tech freaks out there brace your selves, Google has released an all new installment of maps, they call it the New Google Maps. Although in my personal opinion the older Google Maps were just fine. But hey technology changes with time, nobody likes obsolete software. So lets find out in this article how this New Google Maps is an improvement over an old one. In this The New Google Maps A Sneak Preview article I would also be introducing the New Google Maps Android App.

Another interesting thing about the new Google Maps is that they are not available to everyone yet. They are only available by an invite, luckily I requested an invite and received it quick. Although while I was surfing the internet, I found some articles stating one can enable new Google Maps, by adding a cookie. I haven’t tried it, but if any one tries it, and if it works do let me know by adding a comment below. BTW you will see this window if you’re officially invited.

Whats new?

Now the question is whats new in new Google Maps ? To answer that, the first thing that I noticed was the smooth interactive interface. To start off I took a tour. It says there’s a new interactive search box (by the way this also had real smooth animations), and asked me to search “sushi, boston, USA”. Since I am reviewing this, I searched this in both old and new Google Maps.

Now the major differences I observed were in user experience. The new Google Maps have much better user experience. For example, in new one, my search results were shown on screen, instead of pins. On the other hand in old one, results were listed in left column, with markers/pins on screen. Also in new Google maps another addition is to perform a search right away to show results from top reviewers and perform related searches, like veggie burgers, and Asian restaurants. This feature is not available in old version.

In new interface when I click on “Snappy Sushi”, the pin pops up in an animated way, an improvement over the old version. But the focus here is information about that marker. It shows various options like street view and photos, I know this also exists in old version but this is shown in a better manner to improve the overall user experience.

Another new feature in new Google Maps is to “See the world from every angle”. According to this feature we can view any place from every angle like, street view, photo tours, and other imagery in the carousel. Another addition in new Google Maps is to get info cards about, almost every thing. Like click on a street to get an info card or click on a park or on a building and you’ll get an info card. This improves the user experience to a next level as this doesn’t exist in the old version. Also you can switch to earth view, in this you can view maps in 3D and pan tilt according to your need.

The New Google Maps on Android

All these features are also available on Google Maps Android App. On Android app you can use whole lot of features like:

1. Navigation Beta
2. Live Traffic
3. Transit
4. Walking Directions
5. Biking Direction Beta
6. Offline Maps
7. Indoor Maps
8. My Location and Compass

Therefore to conclude I would say the new Google Maps as a whole is a great improvement over the old one. As they have improved its interface and experience to the next level. But I also have a suggestion for the Google Maps team. At the moment stripped down version of Google Maps is available on iPhone .We all know Google is a very strong competitor for apple, but Google is providing a service by the name of Google Maps, therefore all these features should also be present for the iPhone app.

Still its been a great interactive experience with new Google Maps, therefore I’d give a THUMBS UP to it. To stay connected with us share this with your friends on Google+ and Facebook also like our Facebook page.

Mohit Gupt

Born in New Delhi, India. A software engineer by profession, an android enthusiast and mobile development evangelist. My motive here is to create a group of skilled engineers, who can build better software. Reason being programming is my passion, and also it feels good to make a device do something you want. Professionally I have worked with many software engineering and product development firms. As of now too, I am employed as a senior engineer in a leading tech company. In total I may have worked on more than 20 projects professionally, but whenever I get spare time I share my thoughts here at Truiton.

www.truiton.com

The post The New Google Maps A Sneak Preview appeared first on Truiton.

On 15th May 2013 Google announced a new development environment at its I/O summit 2013. Google calls it Android Studio. After listening to this I got a feeling that Google intends to build a platform just as Apple’s Xcode for iPhone app development. This may be a good thing for developers as Google claims it has many new features in it like, Gradle based support, Android specific refactoring, ProGaurd and app signing capabilities, lint tools performance improvements, template based wizards for designes, referral tracking and many more.

Since I am an Android fanatic at Truiton, I had to set it up on my machine. The setup can be downloaded from here. After downloading the setup make sure JAVA_HOME and JDK_HOME environment variables are set up. If not please follow the steps below:

Step 1. Find JDK Installation Directory

If you already know the installation path for the Java Development Kit, go to Step 2 below. Otherwise, find the installation path by following these instructions:

1. If you didn’t change the installation path for the Java Develpoment Kit during installation, it will be in a directory under C:\Program Files\Java. Using Explorer, open the directory C:\Program Files\Java.
2. Inside that path will be one or more subdirectories such as C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_11.

Step 2. Set the JDK_HOME Variable

Once you have identified the JDK installation path:

1. Right-click the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Properties.
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Environment Variables button.
4. Under System Variables, click New.
5. Enter the variable name as JDK_HOME.
6. Enter the variable value as the installation path for the Java Development Kit.
7. Click OK.
8. Click Apply Changes.

If JAVA_HOME variable is also not set on your machine use the above steps to set one up, but with different path obviously. With these variables set up your installation must be running.

After I installed my copy of Android Studio, I thought of developing an app to test the new IDE. Although Google has stated that this version is just a developer preview and needs many improvements, I find it very easy to use. The only flaw in Android Studio as per me is, that its kinda slow. Its draining my machine’s processing power, but still its not delivering fast output. This maybe due to its whole new Gradle base build support. As per wikipedea page for Gradle it states “Gradle was designed for multi-project builds which can grow to be quite large, and as such, it supports incremental builds by intelligently determining which parts of the build tree are up-to-date, so that any task dependent upon those parts will not need to be re-executed.” . But since this Android Studio is in developer preview as of now, I am sure in near future this would replace Eclipse for android development. Here are some screen shots of my version:

To make this even more cool Google has developed themes for it, in these screen shots, I have been using Dracula theme, it adds an Android touch to it. With this I conclude Android Studio First Look. If you like this, share it and connect with us on Google+ and Facebook.

Mohit Gupt

Born in New Delhi, India. A software engineer by profession, an android enthusiast and mobile development evangelist. My motive here is to create a group of skilled engineers, who can build better software. Reason being programming is my passion, and also it feels good to make a device do something you want. Professionally I have worked with many software engineering and product development firms. As of now too, I am employed as a senior engineer in a leading tech company. In total I may have worked on more than 20 projects professionally, but whenever I get spare time I share my thoughts here at Truiton.

www.truiton.com

The post Android Studio First Look appeared first on Truiton.