vufone wizard
One of the biggest challenges developing a mass-market mobile application using J2ME (targeting, for example, Nokia S40, SonyEricsson or Motorola devices) clients is application permissions - or more accurately - how to effectively help users to download the application and set its permissions correctly.
When a mobile operator deploys a service onto his phones he can preset or pre-load the client with the right permissions and his own certificate to the device and that’s it. Third party service providers or software developers need to rely on different mechanism. When we (or other software developers) develop a software to be downloaded to mobile phones, we need to sign the application with a certain authority (such as Java Verified, Verisign or Thawt) which grants the application permissions to access data on the phone. Alas, these permissions are lower than of the handset manufacturer or the mobile operator and require the user to manually set the permission of the application.
For years this requirement resulted, IMHO, in a major setback of mobile application development and prevented real innovation to penetrate mass-market devices.
The reason I’m sharing this frustration is that this problem was the focus of the recent upgrade of the vufone service.
When registering to the vufone service users basically need to follow 3 main steps:
- Download the agent to your phone
- Set the application’s permissions correctly to allow smooth access to the data on the phone
- Configure your account with the data you would like to sync, how often etc.
Since we cannot override the current crippling J2ME signing processes, we developed a special wizard which guides you though the entire process with real screen shots of a phone. Moreover, during the entire process the phone reports exactly what you did so we can either progress automatically to the next step or offer you the correct troubleshooting steps to correct your steps.
I believe that this is the first time such a tool is available and I’m certain that following these easy steps, screen shots and simple guidance on the screen (both web and phone) will simplify this process.
Currently we implemented the full Wizard for Nokia S40, Nokia S60 and SonyEricsson devices. Other devices see a more basic version. We will add the wizards for other phone platforms in the upcoming days. We will be happy to hear any feedback to the wizards we introduced to vufone.
