Hey all.

I'm a developer but new to Android. I'm currently a student doing research into social networking on Android. What I need to do is to record the frequency and medium of communications over Android.

For example; When User X communicates with User Y by a Phone call, sms, email, facebook, voIP apps like Viber, or one of the free messaging apps such as Whatsapp or Kakaotalk, I want to record this activity.

I don't need the actual message content since it will all be anonymolised anyways, I just need the Contact name and the number of messages + dates and times.

I think the biggest problem is getting this information from the free voIP/message apps like Whatsapp/Kakaotalk/Viber.

Would anyone be able to shed some light on how I'd go about recording such activity ?

Hi daesu,

What kind of privacy expectations could a person using a phone that would allow this have? In fact this is the kind of thing that has caused trouble for Google and Apple both. Especially given your requirement to have the "contact", a lot of users might be very wary of this if you tell them. If you don't, well then its pretty close to spyware.

That being said, you could intercept phone calls, sms messages and probably emails rather easily with broadcast receivers. All those other things would take more effort I think. If they accept a push model like the phone and sms then they might use the same broadcast receiver solution but some of them might have to be initiated by the user.

Here's my favorite tutorial for sms to get you started:

http://pankajchunchun.wordpress.com/201 ... n-android/

Hope this helps.

Phyll

Hey Phyll,

First of all thank you very much. I'm sorry regarding the privacy issue I should have explained more. I only want to use this code to gain some information on a select number of people for research purposes. I will of course explain what I am doing to all the participants and once the information is retrieved all names, numbers etc will be anomylised and given unique identifiers instead.

Thanks again, I will look into broadcast receivers.

Hi daesu,

That's ok I'm not the privacy police. Just pointing out why they don't make it as easy as you might think. When you have specific questions go ahead and ask 'em.

Thanks,

Phyll