#cotap

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Recently, the Android developers at Cotap began seeing this error when installing alpha and beta versions of the app:

INSTALL_FAILED_DUPLICATE_PERMISSION perm=com.cotap.xxx.permission.C2D_MESSAGE pkg=com.cotap.xxxx

At first I chalked it up to some bug in Android 5.0, since it started showing up only in L and above. However, one of our team members, Lillian Michalek, pointed out that it was only happening in builds I shipped. It turns out this was due to a change in the way Android 5.0 handles custom permissions. See an explanation from CommonsWear. At this point I knew there had to be more going on. Clearly, I should not be getting that exception because we were all using the same keystore to sign the apps built in our particular machines.

As a sanity check, I bumped the version number and built a production version of the app. Lo and behold, I could not install it on my phone. Meaning that, if I pushed that to the Play Store, customers would not be able to update their app. I asked Lillian to run the same experiment, building on her machine, and installing it on her phone. She had no issues.

Problem:

Although I had the same keystore on my local machine as Lillian, the app was being signed by a different keystore, with the same alias and password. This happened because, as part of reinstalling my development environment, I innocently ran the following keytool command before dropping our shared keystore into my machine:

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore keystore_name.keystore -alias keystore_alias -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 365

You can learn more about the Java Keytool here. The command above created a key that had the same alias and password as the one in our project. Worse, even though I was telling it to use a keystore in our project via the Gradle build, this was being overridden by the one I had created above.

signingConfigs {     release {          storeFile file("keystore_name.keystore")

         keyAlias "keystore_alias"          storePassword some_password          keyPassword some_other_password     } }

To prove I was using another keystore to sign my version of the apps I needed to dig deeper into what was being signed by what. These two answers to the same question listed the steps needed to open an apk and retrieve the .RSA file in order to see what keys were being used to sign the app. As you can see in the image below, Lillian had a different certificate.

Another giveaway in hindsight: since we are using a shared certificate in our project, the keytool command should not be aware of it. So if I ran the following command, I should not see anything: 

$ keytool -list -keystore keystore_name.keystore

Instead there was a certificate with that name as a result of my previous “keytool -genkey” command.

Another way to see which flavor of the apps were signed with what certificate, you can use the following Gradle command, also from Stack Overflow: 

$ ./gradlew signingReport

This will give you an output showing you what keystore is being used for which app:

Solution:

To right this wrong I deleted the keystore that the keytool had created, and made sure to drop the right shared keystore in my local project. To delete a keystore you can use the following command:

$ keytool -delete -alias keystore_alias -keystore keystore_name.keystore

 I got that in Stack Ov… jk! This site lists common Keytool commands. After that, all was groovy.

Bonus!

I know no one checks their production keystore into git. Right?!?! Here is how we save our keystore password in the Mac Keychain.

Put your keystore in your favorite directory. Here is our signingConfigs in the build.gradle file:

signingConfigs {     release {         storeFile file("keystore_name.keystore")

        keyAlias "keystore_alias"         storePassword getPassword('ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD')         keyPassword getPassword('ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD')     } } 

Now use this method to pull the password from the Keychain. Notice it will prompt you in the command line if it can’t find it:

def getPassword(sysvar) {     String pw = System.getenv(sysvar)     if (pw == null) {         def command = """security find-generic-password -w -a whatever_you_want"""         def proc = command.execute()         proc.waitFor()

        if (proc.exitValue() == 0) {             pw = proc.in.text.trim()         } else if (System.console() != null) {             pw = new String(System.console().readPassword("\n\$ Enter keystore password: "))         }     }     return pw } 

Lastly, add your password to the Keychain. Below are the 4 steps: Now your password is automatically entered when building! Enjoy!

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/the-fractured-state-of-enterprise-messaging-why-cant-anyone-get-it-right/

The fractured state of enterprise messaging: Why can’t anyone get it right?

GUEST POST

Image Credit: OtnaTdur/Shutterstock

Picture this: You’re part of a new project at your company with team members spread across different floors, different buildings, or even different cities. Excited to get started, you want to make sure that the team is able to communicate with each other seamlessly to get the project moving as fast as possible. You turn to email to get your messages across quickly, which is actually a huge mistake. Hours go by simply waiting for people to respond, even if it’s just for a quick update or short confirmation. Ultimately, email is slowing down the entire project.

Sound familiar?

Rapid communication among teams in any organization is crucial for success, yet today’s communication technology offerings seem to fall short when it comes to enterprise. And email has seen little innovation over the last decade, continuing instead to remain slow, asynchronous, and unsuitable for anything requiring speed.

Although workplace chat tools is a nascent space, no one has been able to nail it for businesses.

Take for instance consumer-driven instant messengers like Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and others. These apps make you share your personal IDs with colleagues, bosses, and clients, which is just not something everyone feels comfortable doing. Mixing your professional conversations with personal exchanges can be a recipe for disaster, and using different channels for different clients or work contacts can become confusing and oftentimes messy.

Another example of bad enterprise messaging is Microsoft Lync, a platform for unified enterprise communications. Few organizations can really use a messaging solution like this. It’s incredibly expensive for small and medium-sized businesses, and requires an IT taskforce to set it up effectively and maintain.

Alternative services like Yammer and SharePoint are available, but the problem is the rate of adoption on these services is extremely low. According to a report from Forrester, 54 percent of businesses said they do not see the level of adoption they expected, while 51 percent said users just don’t like the SharePoint experience. That’s not to say you shouldn’t check out the few enterprise-level services that are actually attempting to fix the problem of bad team-level communication.

A few forcing enterprise messaging to evolve

The enterprise messaging space has certainly evolved over the past few months, with new chat apps offering a myriad of solutions are working to fill the much-needed gap. One such app is Flock.co, a multi-platform messenger for teams and businesses with desktop and mobile clients. There’s also Slack, a power user-messaging software that provides various integrations that make it easy for software engineering teams to integrate with Github. Another worth mentioning is Cotap.

Easy to use with little to no IT support, these apps can be installed by anyone in the organization. Both Flock and Cotap include multi-platform support, too. Other features include synched conversations, group chat, auto populating company directories and chat usernames, secure conversations, file sharing, chat history, admin interfaces, and more.

Flock.co, Slack, Cotap, and other similar offerings provide a much required alternative to using personal messaging apps in the workplace and maintain the separation between your employees’ work and personal lives. With little to no cost and no IT staff to support, organizations that adopt this new wave of instant messaging solutions are finding them a handy replacement for email — and spending several hours a day using them while increasing efficiency through easier collaboration.

Unified communication apps can make a real impact for a business, not to mention considerably improve productivity of its workers. But as previously mentioned, the new wave of enterprise communication services have yet to reach critical mass among companies. It will, however, be interesting to see how this space plays out over the next few years, and I expect we’ll see some very interesting innovations going forward.

Bhavin Turakhia is the CEO of international calling service Ringo as well as a serial entrepreneur. He has founded and continues to run several successful businesses, including BigRock, Resellerclub, Logicboxes, and Radixregistry.com. He is passionate about the communications space, and envisions a world where high-quality communication is free for the masses.

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/cotap-plugs-into-box-to-make-enterprise-file-sharing-as-easy-as-sending-a-text/

Cotap plugs into Box to make enterprise file-sharing as easy as sending a text

Image Credit: Cotap

Normally, I can’t stand to hear about yet another messaging app — how many times are we going to reinvent the wheel? — but Cotap is a little different, and it added a cool new feature today.

Unlike most other messaging services, Cotap is for employees, and today the company released support for the major cloud file-storage providers, as well as a desktop app, and updates to it iOS and Android apps.

Now, the service supports files hosted via Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, enabling users to send, receive, and view files from any of these storage providers. It lets users send a file “to one or many people with just a few taps, similar to sharing a photo in most messaging apps,” the company says.

Cotap built this capability atop Box’s standalone Box View API, a repurposing of Crocodoc’s HTML5-based viewing technology for Microsoft Office and PDF files. The app can connect to multiple file-storage accounts and providers, making it convenient for companies that use a mix of those. The app also shows the most recently updated files on top, helping employees easily see the freshest information.

In addition to the file-storage integrations, Cotap has also released web and Mac apps to enable employees to use Cotap from a variety of devices. Funny enough, the desktop app reminds me of the Mac Messages app which connect’s the iOS’s text messaging app, possibly a subtle hint that Cotap wants to be the default text messaging for work.

And lastly, Cotap has added easier ways to manage your contacts. Now, the app auto-populates contacts with others that share the same corporate email, eliminating the need to manually add coworkers.

Co-founded by former Yammer head of product Jim Patterson, Cotap seems to want to bridge the gap between traditional corporate-style communications such as Yammer and consumer-focused services like Skype.

Cotap counts companies such as the Hyatt Regency, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Philz Coffee among its customers.

The company was founded in 2013 by Zack Parker and Jim Patterson, and is based in San Francisco. Cotap has raised $15.5 million in funding so far.

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Yammer (acquired by Microsoft in 2012) is the leader in enterprise social networking, providing a secure way for employees to communicate, collaborate, and share information. The basic version of Yammer is free, and customers can pay t... read more »

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