Job: auto-updater and Launcher/home screen app

[I apologize if this forums is not a place for a job-offer. Let me know and I will remove it immediately.]

We’d like to hire an “f-droider” to work remotely on an Android app that will:

  • Run as a basic “Home Screen Launcher” replacing the default, and
  • Receive and install updates for our apps independently from Google Play (i.e. operates as System App on an OEM/rooted device built for us).

The goal is to disable Google Play from the Android devices at schools, have own app distribution channel and a locked home screen.

Open-source examples of above are available, such as:

If interested, inquire at jobs@pushcoin.com

  1. There are many different FOSS launchers. What should your launcher do differently form the ones available?

  2. F-Droid with the privileged extension can automatically install updates. Now it is also much easier to create your own F-Droid repository.

The project involves creating a simple MDM. The Home screen app needs to fetch configuration from the restful cloud service telling it which apps are visible to the user and what settings are exposed (like WiFi, brightness) or enforced (lockscreen).

Devices are managed in groups and each group can feature different apps or versions of the apps.

Partial roll-outs are important - if we need to try a new app version in production, we want to push it to a small subset of devices, see if it hasn’t broken anything then push to all.

We tried many MDMs on the market, from Airwatch all the way to lesser-known ones and apart from a fairly high ongoing cost, considering this is for K12 schools, the commercial MDMs come with many features we don’t care about or are missing the one feature we do care for.

So, we would rather pay a FOSS developer or team to create what we need.