[guardian-dev] how to make panic button API for Android Apps

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On 04/08/2013 01:01 PM, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> On 04/05/2013 02:35 PM, Hans of Guardian wrote:
>> I just had a thought for the further development of the Panic Button/In The Clear features:  there should be a way for apps to advertise things that should be triggered by a central panic button.  This could happen in a number of ways:
>> * standard panic broadcast that a central app sends, then each app has its own preferences for what that panic triggers
>> * each app exposes all possible panic intents to the central panic control, then the user has a centralized place to configure the entire panic behavior across apps.
>> Has anyone seen anything like this?
> 
> It is a fantastic idea, but I am really concerned how we would
> authenticate or limit the panic broadcast initiation. If you use
> standard Android event broadcasting, seems like it would be fairly easy
> for a malicious app to impersonate.

Yeah, we'd definitely need some kind of authentication process to have each
app opt-in and register to the central panic button.  It would have to be
implemented as a Android Broadcast intent.  The central panic button app could
sent Intents directly to the panic Activity on each app, based on the list the
user configured.  Then there would be a permission set in each app to control
what app can call the panic Activity.

.hc