On Mar 1, 2012 2:54 AM, "MikeG" <[email protected]> wrote: > > What you are saying does not make any sense. >
I'm not sure if you were confused because I was not speaking 'telly-gently, or if you just don't understand why. What I was suggesting just that the behavior you describe is intentional and persistent across most stock roms that have shipped on devices I've looked at. And the decision to make it that way makes android a non-ideal choice for business. Remember, the OS came and was released. Much later the ability to connect to enterprise networks and email came along. It was not the main objective. Suppporting Companies is not the buisness model that has proven sucessful. Carriers do not want to let you download unsupported file types because it increases their potential support load. Google probably does not want you to be able to do what you describe because they do not want every other developer to be able to easily distribute their paid app securely through some default store front. They wouldn't control the ecosystem. This is not an official or even informed opinion. It is just my bitter and pissed off conspiracy theory... or whatever you want to call it. They have crippled devices intentionally to support their interests. It's just good business from their point of view. If your company orders a couple million phones from google or Motorola, you'll probably have someone coding the requisite changes into the official android market tomorrow to support you distributing your app there. > They also make it difficult for an enterprise to embrace a mobile > architecture that utilizes personal devices. "Personal devices" is the main problem here. As long as they can get business email and other stuff a businessperson wants (dunno what they think that is though), they don't care. You are not their customer. Unfortunate. But the way it is. Catering to buisness seems to have failed for WinMo and RIM. As long as the current consumer target is working for them... > I can download and install www.mysite.com/myPOSapp.apk > all day long if the site has anonymous access. > But as soon as authentication is required, download is impossible unless > I install a browser that is capable of authenticating. Seems to me if you can > download and install anonymously, you should be able to do the same when > required to authenticate. You could use scp with a key for authentication if you didn't like wget. Would still involve downloading a seperate middleman. but you could at least have a publicly accessible or emailable "installer" that users could download once, enter their credentials to get the app, and have updates triggered in-app after that. Alternatively, if the app is not huge (and if it is, strip it of graphics maybe), just have it emailed to them though the corporate account. That is just as secure, right? The app can download any removed images from a server after installing. > Heck, the users in my company are no different that the rest of the world - > they just want to point and click. A BusyBox solution is no different than a > company wide email that says "Hey, come to the Kiosk in the cafeteria and > bring your device and a USB cable to install our new POS app." The current > solution is to download something so you can download the company app. Ok, I'll stick with my suggestion of emailing either the app or an installer then. If it is just a content app, there is always the option to make the whole thing an HTML bookmark/shortcut, and use HTML5 localStorage to permanently cache relevant user data and images offline for speed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the current restrictions. Stuff like this makes me see red and start sputtering off incoherently. Especially when I know there is a #$%^*ing multi-user linux kernel hiding somewhere under all the Dalvik crap. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
