LokLok for Android lets you send doodles, photos and messages directly from your lockscreen

 

Mobile messaging apps may be reaching both saturation point and convergence, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more, right? Meet LokLok.

LokLok sells itself as a connected lock-screen that is always in-sync with you and your favorite group of people. You can draw, write messages, or add photos to your screen, and it shows up on your friends’ screens – all without leaving the lock-screen. This could be a single person, or a whole group.

How it works

With LokLok set as your lockscreen, you tap twice to make it editable (i.e. you choose to doodle), or swipe up to unlock and use your phone as normal.

To draw, you simply use a single finger to make your markings, and to erase you pinch outwards with two fingers.

There’s a number of editing tools available including one that takes you directly to your camera or camera roll, while the palette option lets you choose your tool, brush-stroke and color. Next up, hit the three-dots at the bottom to share (or invite friends to join) and you’re good to go.

LokLok is effectively a synchronized whiteboard, making it as easy as possible to share notes, pictures and random doodles with anyone. Without anyone having to unlock their device.

LokLok says it’s looking to push push experiments around unconventional messaging one step further. “The idea is to use the first interaction that a user has with his phone for the communication process,” explains creator Guillermo Landin, who works as a UX director for Portugal-based Kwamecorp.

“I was curious to see if I could use the screen as the communication channel itself,” continues Guillermo. The original experiment developed into a prototype based on widgets and an HTML5 canvas, then Guillermo brought in a small team to work specifically on the app.

For the security conscious among you, LokLok only keeps the latest image of each group on the server, so when you clear the screen, it’s gone forever. Ephemeral is the key (buzz)word here.

On the surface, this seems like a classic example of something that’s possible on Android but not iOS. However, we’re told they’re already working on a version for Apple’s mobile operating system, “focusing on new possibilities that iOS 8 will introduce.”

Crucial security problem in Google Play: Thousands of secret keys found in android apps

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Some of the secret keys, including Facebook and LinkedIn, were discovered by PlayDrone, a tool developed by Columbia Engineering researchers that uses hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources.

In a paper presented -- and awarded the Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award -- at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on June 18, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot reported that they have discovered a crucial security problem in Google Play, the official Android app store where millions of users of Android, the most popular mobile platform, get their apps.

"Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into Google Play -- anyone can get a $25 account and upload whatever they want. Very little is known about what's there at an aggregate level," says Nieh, who is also a member of the University's Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering's Cybersecurity Center. "Given the huge popularity of Google Play and the potential risks to millions of users, we thought it was important to take a close look at Google Play content."

Nieh and Viennot's paper is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge Google Play marketplace. To do this, they developed PlayDrone, a tool that uses various hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources. PlayDrone scales by simply adding more servers and is fast enough to crawl Google Play on a daily basis, downloading more than 1.1 million Android apps and decompiling over 880,000 free applications.

Nieh and Viennot discovered all kinds of new information about the content in Google Play, including a critical security problem: developers often store their secret keys in their apps software, similar to usernames/passwords info, and these can be then used by anyone to maliciously steal user data or resources from service providers such as Amazon and Facebook. These vulnerabilities can affect users even if they are not actively running the Android apps. Nieh notes that even "Top Developers," designated by the Google Play team as the best developers on Google Play, included these vulnerabilities in their apps.

"We've been working closely with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other service providers to identify and notify customers at risk, and make the Google Play store a safer place," says Viennot. "Google is now using our techniques to proactively scan apps for these problems to prevent this from happening again in the future."

In fact, Nieh adds, developers are already receiving notifications from Google to fix their apps and remove the secret keys.

Nieh and Viennot expect PlayDrone to lay a foundation for new kinds of analysis of Android apps. "Big data is increasingly important and Android apps are just one form of interesting data," Nieh observes. "Our work makes it possible to analyze Android apps at large scale in new ways, and we expect that PlayDrone will be a useful tool to better understand Android apps and improve the quality of application content in Google Play."

Other findings of the research include:

• showing that roughly a quarter of all Google Play free apps are clones: these apps are duplicative of other apps already in Google Play

• identifying a performance problem resulting in very slow app purchases in Google Play: this has since been fixed

• a list of the top 10 most highly rated apps and the top 10 worst rated apps in Google Play that included surprises such as an app that, while the worst rated, still had more than a million downloads: it purports to be a scale that measures the weight of an object placed on the touchscreen of an Android device, but instead displays a random number for the weight

Good news for the hundreds of thousands of developers who upload content to Google Play and even more so for the millions of users who download the content.