Interview with tenCube, the development team behind WaveSecure

Way back at the tail end of last year, I reviewed a beta version of a great security app called WaveSecure. At that time, despite a few niggly flaws, it was obvious that this was a special app. Those niggly flaws have all been resolved and WaveSecure went on to become one of the overall winners of ADC2.

WaveSecure is a security app which allows you to remotely lock and/or wipe your mobile phone should it get lost or stolen. You can also use it to backup and restore your messages, contacts, etc or even use a phone’s location services to track down where your lost or stolen phone has ended up. It’s an essential app to have for anyone who carries confidential or important data around with them on their phone.

WaveSecure’s developers, Singapore based tenCube, have published versions of the app for multiple mobile phone OS’es such as Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. And, from their About page, they “are recognized as one of the Top 100 tech start-ups in Asia by Red Herring, as well as Global Top 16 start-up by Intel-Berkeley Entrepreneurship challenge. WaveSecure was awarded ‘Top 10 wireless innovations’ by Frost & Sullivan and is one of six recipients of GES Award by Asian Wall Street Journal.”

The folks at tenCube very kindly agreed to answer a few questions on their experiences with getting WaveSecure for Android published, and also discussed their future plans for the app.

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about tenCube and it’s background in mobile applications development?

tenCube was started about 5 years back. We are a bunch of startup geeks looking for something cutting edge to do, and we particularly like mobile so we have focused our energy on thinking about the future of mobile back then. It was pretty clear that, software on standard open mobile OSes (now often simplified to just “apps”, which often implies simple programs and may understate the potential of mobile software).

We started looking at various applications that could be interesting and then one day, almost by accident, we discovered our purpose, as you can see in the answer to the next question.

What was the inspiration for WaveSecure? Did someone at the company lose a mobile, or have it stolen?

Exactly, it’s a classic story. One of the founders, Varun Chatterji, lost his brand new phone, the Nokia 6600, which was a very expensive and advanced phone back then. So it dawned on us that actually the biggest problem we face in mobile industry is the simple fact that people lose phones – anything between 5-25% of a population, depending on where you are, loses a phone a year. It was already a pretty huge problem back then, with almost a billion phones. And this is only going be more massive, within 5 years the problem has tripled to 3 billion mobile users, most of them are doing more and more important things on the phone – email, texting/IM, photos, browsing, social networking, banking, etc.

More importantly, the fundamental idea is that – you should NOT need to lose a phone ever again. Mobiles are always-on, always-connected, it is smart and collects lots of data and has the ability to send them wirelessly. You can lose your wallet or keys and not get them back, these are dumb offline objects, but there is absolutely no reason why you should lose your phone!

And we are all about changing that.

WaveSecure is available on a number of different mobile OSes, which is the most popular format?

By user base, the biggest is still Symbian S60. However, by rate of growth, Android is definitely sky rocketing.

Can you let us know a little bit about the development cycle for your apps – do you code everything from scratch for each phone OS, or do you code in one coding environment and port the titles across?

We wish we could code in one environment and port across platforms but unfortunately it is not as simple as it sounds. It is especially complicated for WaveSecure because we access a lot of low level system APIs and all the clients for different platforms interface with the WaveSecure server.

Some platforms such as Android and BlackBerry could share some code since they are both based on Java. However, the code shared was only about 40% and the rest had to be written from scratch.

From a development cycle perspective, the four main platforms that we support (Android, Symbian, WM, BB) are run by different teams on independent cycles. The approach we usually take for new features is to have one platform implement it first, and once the specs are fleshed out and the kinks + flows are ironed out, the rest of the platforms follow suit.

Many users, myself included, first became aware of the name WaveSecure when it was announced that the app would be bundled as part of the MoDaCo custom rom for the Hero. How did that come about, did you approach Paul, or did he make contact with you?

Paul sent us a 2 line email after about 2 weeks of listing our app on Android Market and asked if he could distribute our app with the MoDaCo custom ROM. We weren’t sure what to expect but we were very glad to work with Modaco because we believe, in the long run, that a product like WaveSecure should come as part of the OS/firmware, it should be available by default and should be resilient against any attacks such as firmware reset, etc. Modaco is a very good step towards setting a standard for that, and Modaco users are also very savvy users who understands the benefits of a ROM-integrated WaveSecure instantly.

It was a pleasant surprise. As you said, a lot of people got to hear about us because of this and we got great feedback from the MoDaCo community (not to mention a fantastic extended, highly capable test users who gave us great feedback). This helped us improve our app tremendously. It so happened that this was the critical period of September – November 2009 where a slew of new Android devices (and OS versions) were launched and we got a lot of help from the MoDaCo community to support new devices, networks etc

Paul’s decision to include us in the MoDaCo ROM definitely contributed to our ADC win and we are thankful for it. We continue to work closely with the MoDaCo community and plan to continue to offer WaveSecure for free to MoDaCo premium members once WaveSecure becomes a paid app on 1^st April, 2010.

How have you found publishing apps to the Android Market? Do you think there is anything that could be done to improve the market? And, how does it stack up against the other OS apps markets?

Compared to other app stores, submission and approval process for apps on Android Market is relatively fuss-free. However, the tool available to publishers to measure app performance is rather limited. Aside from a total download count, Market doesn’t offer you any other metric relating to performance. You can’t even separate downloads by month or country. Offering Google Analytics tracking for Market seems like a logical move. They are already offering similar integration with AdSense and AdWords.

More can be done to help publishers, too. Starting with simple yet essential things like increasing the current 325-characters limit of the app description. The web listing of Android Market at http://www.android.com/market/ actually hinders people from exploring various apps. In fact, you can’t even perform a search, kind of an irony coming from Google. This obvious void prompted as many sites such as Androlib offer users a better and richer alternative.

If Google is offering Checkout as the only payment method, country coverage needs to be expanded so developers can better monetize their apps. Else, other modes of payment could be offered.

Do you publish your apps to any of the non-official Android markets? If so, how have you found that experience?

Yes, we have published to the non-official Android Markets. The publishing experience was pretty seamless, but the experience from the user perspective to discover the non-top 50 apps could be better. That said, this is a problem with the Android Market as well

Which devices do you use for testing, and which (if any) Android devices do you use yourself for the day to day stuff?

We carry around a lot of Android devices and they double up as our testing devices. Given the fragmentation of the platform, we have to test on a wide range of Android devices in house to ensure that we’ve covered as many Android devices as possible. The list of devices that we test on for every release includes:

1. HTC Dream (stock, Android 1.6)
2. HTC Dream (rooted, Android 1.5)
3. HTC Hero (rooted, MoDaCo)
4. HTC Hero (stock, 1.5)
5. Nexus One (stock, 2.1)
6. HTC Tattoo (stock, 1.6)
7. Geeks’Phone One (rooted, 1.5)
8. Sony Ericsson X10 (stock, 1.6)

If there is a big, new feature that we introduce that requires testing on devices/networks that we don’t have access to here in Singapore (such as the Droid and the Sprint Hero) we tap on our champion users who are very helpful in helping us test out new features!

Personally, our top favorites are – Dream, Hero & X10

What are your favourite free and paid Android apps?

1. Millionaire (Japanese card game, not longer available on the Android Market)
2. Pinball by Androlib
3. Remote Desktop Pro
4. Log Collector
5. Advanced Task Killer
6. Shazam
7. Wireless Tether for root users

(we won’t be so shameless to list WaveSecure, but would love to know if your readers would consider it part of the list!)

How have you found developing for Android? Are there any tools or functions that you’d like to see included that aren’t currently?

Android’s SDK has a good set of developer tools. It’s always a good sign if a platform lets you focus more on your business logic and application workflows than the intricacies of implementation. It is fairly simple to do a lot of tasks on Android which can consume quite a bit of time on other platforms. One of the biggest plus points that Android has over other mobile development platforms is that it dramatically reduces the time it takes to test out small modifications to your code.

Being open source is of great help as well, we referred to the Android source code numerous times to see how things are implemented and learned by example.

Most of our grievance has been around the restrictions that have been put around 3rd party applications. Enabling GPS programmatically, ability to trap the home key, etc can add a lot more value to WaveSecure.

What’s next for your team? Further updates to WaveSecure, or are you planning on something entirely new?

We believe WaveSecure has a lot more potential to be the ultimate security killer app, and we have a long way more to go to make that happen. Not only in terms of making the product better by enhancing its functionalities and features, but a lot of work also go under the hood to scalability, speed, reliability, SMS infrastructure, performance, etc. We have been working on this for almost 5 years now and will not stop until we have actually solve this problem once and for all.

Can you give us a little teaser as to what any new WaveSecure features will be?

Oh there are plenty of new things we are adding to WaveSecure in the near future, as a heads-up for this month, we have kinda invented a technique to overcome the fact that you can easily uninstall Android apps. This is quite exciting as we think this would add a lot of value to users, so watch out for the update coming soon!