problem

It was 2016 and we had two daughters living at home, both of which were in high school. As a result of issues with inappropriate content on their phones, both girls were using flip phones. My wife and I had decided we were going to switch phone carriers so we all needed to get new phones. The girls really wanted to find some way to have smart phones so that they could do more of the things that normal high school girls do with their phones (good camera, music, mms, etc).

my role

As an android developer, I felt really strongly that this was a problem I could solve.

approach

Even though my daughters were slated to be the end users, of this, my real customer was my wife. she had some iron clad constraints for this product to meet our family needs:

• No web browser of any sort, including browser webviews hidden in other apps

• We had to be able to control which apps were available

• It had to be uncircumventable

• It had to be customizable, allowing us to grant permission for more and more as our daughters grew in maturity

I knew there were a number of different ways to accomplish these goals. I did several weeks of experimentation and prototyping to assess them. I tried building a custom version of Android OS with these capabilities installed at the OS level but that proved to be a long, arduous path. I tried writing my own app locking application but that wasn’t robust enough to meet the requirements. My experiments with the android enterprise level MDM APIs proved to check all of the needed boxes. I loaded the initial version of the app I called Highly onto a test phone and handed it to my wife for testing. She also shared it with a couple of friends who were technical support reps and skilled testers. After several round of designing and implementing fixes and additional testing, we were ready for our ultimate testers - our daughters.

results

We went through with our carrier change and in the process purchased two Samsung Galaxy S7s (at the time, the latest greatest Samsung Android device) and I went to work modifying the phones. Onboarding proved to be a slightly tedious process, requiring me to have physical possession of the devices to provision them and then a lot of trial and error and custom code to hide all of the manufacturer and carrier bloatware at a system level to ensure there were no untrusted apps or ways to work around the restrictions. Once that was complete, my wife was able to take the devices and customize the settings for each daughter through a custom settings screen that was protected by a PIN which she set. Our older daughter used her phone for two years while our younger daughter used hers for 4 years. Over that time, my wife did use the ability to customize the devices to install additional apps as she felt our daughters could use them responsibly.

This solution lives on today as my current side project. It has been renamed evolution phone and has been modernized to fit in with the massive changes that have occurred in the Android ecosystem since it was initially built. I’m in the process of ‘productizing’ this for release, which involves solving several interesting problems including workflow/supply chain issues involved in selling a physical product, streamlining onboarding to better fit a true customer, and branding strategy.