Contact Locker Application - Case Study Example

CONTACT LOCKER APPLICATION Student Name Class Instructor Institution of Affiliation City Date CONTACT LOCKER APPLICATION Application motivation Phone privacy has been a major challenge to most users. Mobile phone manufacturers and the operating systems developers always have every phone feature accessible once the phone is on. This openness of the phone to any person in possession has compromised the phone owner's privacy. In a move to reduce this privacy infringement, applications to help lock phone SMSs has been developed. Presently, most operating systems like Android, Windows, and IOS among others have those applications that help their users protect their messages. That is, the messages only become viewable on successful provision of passwords or PINs. With such applications, a level of privacy has been attained. Phone contacts are one of the most critical information that leads to the wrong person once they get access to phones. In most mobile phones, contacts are always available even when a user is not logged in to any specific network. That is, the possession in possession of the phone can always access the contacts once the phone is on. However, do we know that contact information is very important and critical, and should be kept private? With the recent developments in Information technology, contact information contains a number of important personal data such as email addresses, post office addresses, names, mobile numbers, and company of work among others. This information should not avail to everyone who accesses the phone. With the knowledge of such pieces of information, wrong individuals might misuse them for their own malicious benefits. Restricting access to contact information is therefore an important step in reducing such risks. Contact Locker is therefore an application which is intended to help users achieve this functionality, easily and reliably. The application will allow users to add and lock contacts. Locked contacts will require the user to provide a password every time they want to access the contacts. A user is therefore required to create account on the installation of the Contact Locker application. Saving contacts from the common operating systems interfaces or apps tailored with the operating systems has always been hard. Sometimes a user might think that the contacts are saved, only to realize later that the contacts do not exist in their phones. Also, these interfaces only allow users to save limited information, usually name and number. With Contact locker, the game is different. Users are presented with a beautiful form input where they are able to capture more than just phone numbers and names. Also the app allows users to organize the contacts into different groups such as favorite, emergency and others. With the above mentioned features of the Contact Locker applications, it becomes a must have application who would wish to have a better way of managing their contacts. Also, those users who values the privacy of the contact information they store, Contact Locker is a must have application. It gives users a simple way to work with their contacts, given that, through the application, a user is able to call or send a message to any of the locked contacts. Target Audience This application has a wide target group. Almost every individual who uses a phone keeps a contact list, for the purposes of their calls and daily communications. This contact list forms the essence of Contact Locker application. Maintaining a level of privacy and information integrity is the part where the app comes in. This application is only available to users having mobile phones running on the supported operating system. These are Android users. Android users This group of users downloads Contact locker from the Google App store. The application integrates well with the standard android keyboard and other functionalities like the dictionary and the auto-suggestions. It also integrates the call functionality of underlying platform and the messaging functionalities. This group of users downloads the application for free from the store. Competitor Analysis In the Android app stores, there exist a number of applications which work towards achieving the same functionalities as Contact Locker application. However, most of these applications do not provide all that is intended to be provided by Contact Locker. Most of the applications do not provide a robust interface for contact management (AppDK blog, 2015). Also, a clever integration with the underlying platform applications like the keyboard, call, and messaging applications. A number of these applications also focus on the protection of messages or an entire app. Contact locker focuses on the contact information and only locks the contacts so that they are only available on provision of valid passwords. Some of these applications include: a) Hi App Lock This is an Android based application which is responsible for locking of a specific application so that a user will always have to provide a password to use a specific application. Unlike Contact Locker, Hi App Lock locks an entire application preventing the use. This means, someone else without the password or the pin cannot use the specific app. This is poor. Other users should be able to use the application, only the specific information that should be kept secret is what should be hidden. That is why Contact Locker will allow other users to make calls using the phone, but only hides the contact details from unauthorized users. This also prevents other users from deleting contacts or stealing contacts from your phone. b) Vault Vault is another application used for privacy purposes. The application allows users to encrypt their messages and prevent other users from seeing their messages. This application only focuses on hiding the messages sent to users but still shows the contact information of the sender. From the message, the user can know the message sender and retrieve more information about these senders. Vault still provides some level of loopholes in the security level; it is guaranteeing high levels of privacy. For this reason, Contact Locker still provides a higher level of privacy compared to vault applications. c) Secrets Secrets is an Android based application, just like Vault, Secrets provides security on the user messages. It helps in hiding other information like files. Despite the fact this application can help in hiding contact information, and therefore keeping them a secret, it has weaknesses. To retrieve information hidden by the Secrets App, the user send a common code 1111, then they are prompted to enter some code after which they be able to access their hidden information. Actually, secrets provides a good level of privacy, however, the use of code make it a kind of USSD application which suffers all the drawbacks of a USSD app. Contact Locker is phone based application which works simple and requires no USSD kind of operations. The simple, user friendly and attractive interface that comes with Contact Locker makes a cutting edge in the market. The small size of the application makes it supported within small memory spaces, with quick downloading and installation. Providing a robust interface with various functionalities like managing and categorizing contacts plays an important role in the usability of the application. Contact Locker Features and Functionalities Splash Activity It's a splash screen which is visible for dew seconds when user starts the app. Login Activity User can login from here if user has account. New User can go to Sign Up activity form here. After login button clicked, Animation is shown. Sign Up Activity New user can Sign Up from here with name, user name, email, password, confirm password Edit Texts. Login data are stored in SQLite Database from here. On Sign Up button click, user is directly navigated to Log In page. Main Activity User can go to add contract, Emergency contacts, about page and search page from here. Add Activity User can add new contact from here. Contact data are stored in SQLite Database. After Done button pressed user is redirected to Members Activity. Members Activity User can see all his/her contacts saved here. Contacts are shown in Recycler list view. Contact name and number is shown here. After clicking any contact user is redirected to Profile Activity. Profile Activity All details of specific contact are shown here. A call button which redirect user to default phone app with specific number. Emergency Activity Emergency contacts are listed here. About Activity Details of application and developer rate app button. Rate Activity User can rate app with review and username. "See previous Reviews" button to see previous reviews. Pre-Reviews Activity Previous ratings and reviews are listed with username. Reference AppDK blog. (2015). Defining The Unique Selling Proposition of Your Mobile App | AppDK Blog. [online] Available at: http://blog.appdk.co/defining-the-unique-selling-proposition-of-your-mobile-app/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2016]. Read More