3rd Party APK Signing Process requirements? - apk

I work for a device manufacturer that currently does not support 3rd Party APK signing. Any guidance on typical level of effort and/or resource load to establish such a process? For example, I am seeking to understand head count and skill sets involved, typical timeframe to review, test, and approve APK’s. Also, any recommendations for organizations that perform this work as a service?

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Can I still buy Eddystone-EID beacons?

I know asking this question here is not proper, I feel sorry for that.
I have tried searching websites, Amazon and Alibaba, but fail to find any product can support Eddystone-EID.
So, I think developers in stack overflow may know any product can support Eddystone-EID.
Could you share any any information for that?
The two vendors below claim to sell beacons compatible with Eddystone-EID as of October 2021:
Gimbal
Estimote Location Beacons
Before you buy anything beware that Google shut down their beacon platform web services in April 2021. I wrote a full blog post to explain what this means: Eddystone is Dead, Long Live Eddystone!
Using these web services is completely optional for Eddystone-UID and Eddystone-URL, but critical for Eddystone-EID, because the beacon identifier rotates with a crypto algorithm and a “trusted resolver” server is needed to convert the advertised “ephemeral identifier” from jibberish to something meaningful and useful.
Without Google’s beacon platform web services, I am aware of no commercially available trusted resolver for Eddystone-EID. You would need to build your own, which is a non-trivial effort. Without a trusted resolver Eddystone-EID is worthless.
Because of this, make sure the vendors above still support using their products with Eddystone-EID. In time, it is likely they will remove support in their beacon firmware.
Finally, it is important to note that just because Google gave up on their beacon web services, most apps that use Eddystone, iBeacon and Altbeacon are unaffected. Beacons are standardized and will work forever — just don’t use Google web services! Again, beacon technology aside from Eddystone-EID has no need for Google web services.

Can you use Microsoft Power Automate to develop a company wide workflow solution?

I am currently investigating possible tools with which to develop a workflow solution for a company that would be used by the staff to process incoming work and ensure incoming work is routed to the correct people for evaluation and are authorised by the relevant managers before work commences, and that the work is signed off when complete.
Is Microsoft Power Automate the right tool for this kind of work, or is it [simply] a tool for automating ones own personal tasks? I'm looking for something that could be used to develop a tool that would be used by everyone in the company.
I've looked at the various videos but it looks like it might be just something for automating ones personal tasks rather than building something to be shared. Is this correct or can it be used as a software development tool for developing a custom solution for a company?
Look at Business Process Flows (BPFs).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/business-process-flows-overview
The following text is from "Why use business process flows?" on the above link:
Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done.
They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through
the processes their organization has defined for interactions that
need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind. This user experience
can be tailored so that people with different security roles can have
an experience that best suits the work they do.
Use business process flows to define a set of steps for people to
follow to take them to a desired outcome. These steps provide a visual
indicator that tells people where they are in the business process.
Business process flows reduce the need for training because new users
don’t have to focus on which table they should be using. They can let
the process guide them. You can configure business process flows to
support common sales methodologies that can help your sales groups
achieve better results. For service groups, business process flows can
help new staff get up-to-speed more quickly and avoid mistakes that
could result in unsatisfied customers.
You can create broad, or detailed, BPFs, to cover company wide business processes. You can also call on separate normal flows, validations, and more. There are a lot of ways you can use a BPF to move things forward in a company.
Power Automate (aka MS Flow) is a low code/no code business workflow management or process orchestration software, getting more power with Robotic Process Automation & Virtual Agents inclusion.
The concept is having variety of connectors for all the available SaaS solutions (name anything like Dynamics, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Twitter, Facebook, Exchange mailbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc) to act as both Trigger and Action to achieve what we want. At worst case we can use REST APIs to complete the project setup.
Community demo the usefulness of it by showcasing the automation of personal stuffs but it has more. MS Flow is the alternate for Dynamics CRM 365 workflow and SharePoint workflow as well. Definitely it’s an enterprise candidate to solve company wide problems like onboarding, approvals, and many other workflow solutions.
Personally I would look at Azure Logic Apps for that level. It has just about the same connectors as MS Flow , but with the addition of better management, troubleshooting and extensibility capabilities and you get all the benefits of security in Azure and compliance good stuff that companies would need

Maintaining and organizing purchases on multiple platforms

I have an application for various platforms. Let them be iOS, Android and Windows. In order to use a app, a monthly fee needs to be paid, but it just needs to be paid once in order to use all platforms. It is the same as with Spotify, so by paying once, every platform can be used.
According to the guidelines of Google and Apple, I need to offer In-App Purchases for the monthly fee. The system is connected to user accounts, which are managed by a server, which is in my control. I am storing the subscription data of users, so if a user uses the In-App Purchases on iOS, the information is transmitted to the central server in order to unlock the Android-App as well (in case it has been paid on another platform already)
The problem is the following scenario:
A user has a valid subscription which has been payed via Google Play. The iOS and Windows apps are unlocked as well. Now the user uninstalls the Android app, goes to the Google Play website and cancels the subscription. In the current scenario, I am not able to detect this and the subscription will be valid for all other platforms.
The question is:
Is there any pattern to circumvent this problem? Spotify and co are solving this issue as well, so there must be a solution for this
Well, the server that handles the authorization of the user (that is, your server) should query the Google Subscription API, to check if the current subscription is still valid. Each SubscriptionPurchase Resource contains information about when the subscription expires.
(see https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/api-ref/purchases/subscriptions)
For Apple, the same stuff applies: You will get a receipt, and with that receipt, you can query the server at any time to check if that subscription is still valid.
There is a slide which summarizes these points and the pitfalls very well: https://speakerdeck.com/rosapolis/the-recurring-nightmare-cross-platform-in-app-subscription-purchases
Bottom line: You won't be able to make that happen without a server that does the communication between the two stores. It comes with issues, though, as the slide shows.
Bonus: The talk from which the slides are taken is also on Youtube

What service do you use to distribute software? [closed]

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I work for a medium sized software company and have been put to the task of finding a new way of electronically distributing our software. We don't have a super fast connection to distribute it ourselves so it would need to be a solution that we can upload to and send out links to customers. The customers won't be purchasing our software from our website as we already do most of our sales from direct sales and partner sales. Since I joined the company we have grown from CD distribution sized downloads to DVD sized distribution downloads. We released a new version and find the YouSendIT Service to be clunky and 99% of our customers receive a link to download the software. We only send out a printed media if requested. Is there a service besides yousendit that allows for unlimited file size uploads/downloads. I have heard of drop.io and it seemed to be similar to yousendit. If you could please point me in the direction of Electronic software distribution system that is 3rd party hosted would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mike
You should look into Content Delivery Networks, such as Amazon CloudFront.
You might want to reconsider the way you are going about this.
If you software is open source, you should be using sourceforge. Otherwise you should just get a cheap hosting plan with lots of transfer bandwidth.
For example, godaddy has an unlimited account (unlimited transfer, unlimited space) for about $14.95 per month.
You point a sub domain i.e. download.rivageek.com to that server. This gives your users confidence when they download your application.
If they have to go to some ad laden 3rd party site they might think twice about giving you money. If you lose only 1 customer to that, it pays for itself (assuming you charge more than 14.95 for your product).
The fine print on many of those 3rd party sites mean they own whatever you upload as well.
If you'd like something that allows (simplisticly) secure one-time downloads, I've used filehosting.org in the past. They give you a hashed link to the software when you upload it, which you can then email to anybody you want to be able to download the file. If you want, you can set it to delete the file after one download.
In response to using your own domain for the downloads, it's possible to configure both Amazon S3 and CloudFront to use a custom domain name. Here are the instructions for S3 -- very straight forward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html
If emailing out a direct link to your distribution file (zip, etc.) is sufficient, I'd say go with one of these services -- they're very cost effective, reliable, and easy to set up.
You could use a filehosting service or get a regular web host with unlimited bandwidth just avoid Godaddy as its shared hosting is overcrowded and overbooked. (personal experience)

Using Twitter as a mechanism to remote control applications? [closed]

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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq

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