Android Unlock Pattern

[Evelyn Normington]

TheAndroid platform offers many ways to secure your data. From the top down, you can layer security as if you were dressing to venture into the frozen tundra of a winter-struck Canada. One of the outermost layers is the screen lock pattern (or pin). With this pattern, you can set up a fairly strong bit of security that can prevent unwanted users from gaining access to your data.

If your mobile phone device still runs on Android version 4.4 or older versions, use the steps below to get past your Android screen lock security pattern when you are locked out. Be warned though, you need the Google credentials the phone was set up with in order to pull this off.

Step 5: Allow the factory reset to finish. Once this is done, your Android reboots automatically with the default settings. At this stage, you can set a new screen lock pattern from the settings and restore your backed-up data.

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Morgwai said this way will break separation of concern and single responsibility, but you cannot have single responsibility every where. Sometime you need to violate it. Here is an example from Google for MVP:

As I wrote in my comment to the accepted answer, I think that managing navigation from the view layer is a clear breaking of separation of concerns rule: views should contain ONLY methods to update current UI screen.

The problem originates from the android platform design as Activity and Fragment classes contain both methods to operate on UI screen and to send intent objects that start other activities like startActivity.

A clean way to solve this would be to create some Navigator interface that would contain methods related to navigation, make activities implement it and inject it into presenters as well. This way at least from the presenters' standpoint navigation and UI manipulation would be separated. It may however look odd from activities' standpoint: now they would often implement both interfaces (Navigator and View) and pass their reference 2 times to the presenter. If because of this reason you decide to manage navigation from your view layer then at least keep methods for navigating separate from those for manipulating UI: never perform navigation and UI manipulation in the same method.

My guess would be that the Android partition where the files are located may be formatted as EXT4. If that is the case, then the patterns will probably be treated as case sensitive, meaning that you should be using (?i)**autocad instead of just **autocad (or alternatively **AutoCAD).

In MVC, the controller is supposed to be the main entry point. Which is a bit debatable if this is the case when applying it to Android development, since the activity is the natural entry point of most applications.

Presenter - this will handle communication between your model and your view, look at it as a gateway to your model. Meaning, if you have a complex domain model representing, God knows what, and your view only needs a very small subset of this model, the presenters job is to query the model and then update the view. For example, if you have a model containing a paragraph of text, a headline and a word-count. But in a given view, you only need to display the headline in the view. Then the presenter will read the data needed from the model, and update the view accordingly.

Model - this should basically be your full domain model. Hopefully it will help making your domain model more "tight" as well, since you won't need special methods to deal with cases as mentioned above.

By decoupling the model from the view all together (through use of the presenter), it also becomes much more intuitive to test your model. You can have unit tests for your domain model, and unit tests for your presenters.

After working and blogging about MVC and MVP in Android for several years (see the body of the answer below), I decided to capture my knowledge and understanding in a more comprehensive and easily digestible form.

So, I released a full blown video course about Android applications architecture. So, if you're interested in mastering the most advanced architectural patterns in Android development, check out this comprehensive course here.

Design patterns aim at describing a general "trick" that programmer might implement for handling a particular set of recurring software tasks. For example: In OOP, when there is a need for an object to notify a set of other objects about some events, the observer design pattern can be employed.

Architectural patterns, on the other hand, do not address particular software tasks - they aim to provide templates for software organization based on the use cases of the software component in question.

It sounds a bit complicated, but I hope an example will clarify: If some application will be used to fetch data from a remote server and present it to the user in a structured manner, then MVC might be a good candidate for consideration. Note that I said nothing about software tasks and program flow of the application - I just described it from user's point of view, and a candidate for an architectural pattern emerged.

Historically, there were no official guidelines by Google about applications' architectures, which (among other reasons) led to a total mess in the source code of Android apps. In fact, even today most applications that I see still do not follow OOP best practices and do not show a clear logical organization of code.

But today the situation is different - Google recently released the Data Binding library, which is fully integrated with Android Studio, and, even, rolled out a set of architecture blueprints for Android applications.

Two years ago it was very hard to find information about MVC or MVP on Android. Today, MVC, MVP and MVVM has become "buzz-words" in the Android community, and we are surrounded by countless experts which constantly try to convince us that MVx is better than MVy. In my opinion, discussing whether MVx is better than MVy is totally pointless because the terms themselves are very ambiguous - just look at the answers to this question, and you'll realize that different people can associate these abbreviations with completely different constructs.

Due to the fact that a search for a best architectural pattern for Android has officially been started, I think we are about to see several more ideas come to light. At this point, it is really impossible to predict which pattern (or patterns) will become industry standards in the future - we will need to wait and see (I guess it is matter of a year or two).

However, there is one prediction I can make with a high degree of confidence: Usage of the Data Binding library will not become an industry standard. I'm confident to say that because the Data Binding library (in its current implementation) provides short-term productivity gains and some kind of architectural guideline, but it will make the code non-maintainable in the long run. Once long-term effects of this library will surface - it will be abandoned.

Now, although we do have some sort of official guidelines and tools today, I, personally, don't think that these guidelines and tools are the best options available (and they are definitely not the only ones). In my applications I use my own implementation of an MVC architecture. It is simple, clean, readable and testable, and does not require any additional libraries.

So, if you're looking for a good architectural pattern for Android applications that follows SOLID principles, you can find a description of one in my post about MVC and MVP architectural patterns in Android.

The ViewHolder design pattern enables you to access each list item view without the need for the look up, saving valuable processor cycles. Specifically, it avoids frequent calls of findViewById() during ListView scrolling, and that will make it smooth.

MVVM is originated from PresentationModel. When we apply MVC, MVVM, and Presentation Model to an Android app, what we really want is to have a clear structured project and more importantly easier for unit tests.

At the moment, without an third-party framework, you usually have lots of code (like addXXListener(), findViewById(), etc.), which does not add any business value. What's more, you have to run Android unit tests instead of normal JUnit tests, which take ages to run and make unit tests somewhat impractical.

For these reasons, some years ago we started an open source project, RoboBinding - A data-binding Presentation Model framework for the Android platform. RoboBinding helps you write UI code that is easier to read, test, and maintain. RoboBinding removes the need of unnecessary code like addXXListener or so, and shifts UI logic to the Presentation Model, which is a POJO and can be tested via normal JUnit tests. RoboBinding itself comes with more than 300 JUnit tests to ensure its quality.

I've recently gotten a Samsung Galaxy J5. Its default (insecure) unlock procedure involves simply swiping anywhere on the phone in any direction. My primary concerns are (a) being able to quickly unlock and use the phone and (b) not accidentally unlocking the phone when it's in my pocket.

As it is, the 'swipe to unlock' feature is too easy to accidentally unlock, since any movement in any direction is sufficient. A solution to this would be to setup a simple unlock pattern that can be executed quickly and easily. That would make the phone much less likely to be accidentally unlocked whilst in the pocket. However, setting a pattern lock requires a minimum of four points to be used, for security reasons. Using a three-point unlock would make life easier as it would just be a quick swipe in one direction (crucially, a very specific direction, which would make the system much less prone to butt-dialing)...

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