Friday, July 27, 2012

Re: [android-developers] Re: Jelly Bean, READ_LOGS and 'Application Lockers'

Glad to see a response, thanks.

While I think a platform feature vs an API set developers can access is better than nothing, it's also much too restrictive. What I mean by this is that parents and admins want to buy the devices they want to buy -- and still have the ability to "lock them down". This goes for the consumer and enterprise world:
  • Consumers want the latest cool gadgets and/or the budget gadgets -- And they want parental controls on them.
  • Many enterprise users are now allowing BYOD policies as long as certain software is installed on them (e.g. for DLP, etc.)
  • Filtering solutions are very much like anti-virus & anti-malware solutions: People have the one they trust; they don't want any others.
Forcing buyers to stick with devices that have enabled parental control features for example is highly limiting, and I think, a mistake.

Perhaps another solution is a API set and a new level of permission authentication. E.g., an developer would need to sign with a key that contains a trusted CA (Google stamp of approval or such)

On Friday, July 27, 2012 1:26:16 PM UTC-6, Dianne Hackborn wrote:
That activity manager API was never intended to be used to poll the state, it was there to provide debugging information.

I regret making it part of the SDK.  There is really no good use of it for regular applications, and lots of bad uses.

I do agree that having facilities to provide restricted environments for children are important.  I think the goal in the platform will probably be to provide this as a feature in the platform, not an API for people to build on top of.

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