At Esper, we specialize in building a platform and offering management tools for dedicated device solutions. At times, these include custom devices targeting specialized use cases in the realm of new product development (NPD).

Deep Cuts #5 explores Esper’s collaboration with a vertical market solution OEM, which brought a cutting-edge communication device to market.

Deep Cut #5: Unusual Display on Display

Everybody knows Android is all about the screen-centric user experience. What would an Android device be without a display? Yet Android offers a rich operating system with everything needed for full wireless communications across cellular and Wi-Fi at both the OS level and supported hardware.

We engaged with a solution provider that was building its own specialized communication device for first responders. The device ran on specialized cellular networks and required a set of Android ISV apps that delivered push-to-talk (PTT) capabilities used by public safety entities.

This device needed to be extremely rugged, simple to use, and economically priced. One important detail was that it did not have a traditional display typically seen with Android devices — in other words, it did not have a touchscreen. This type of device is generally referred to as “headless.”

The category of headless devices is typically the domain of Linux in IoT. But that’s not this device, as humans use it in potentially stressful situations and sports a correspondingly designed UI: A handful of buttons, a selector knob, and a small OLED display. That’s it.

Given the device's lack of a robust UI, the solution provider's ability to manage the app installation and maintenance of the PTT apps on the device was absolutely critical. Otherwise, it would be impossible to do it at scale. GMS (Google Mobile Services, i.e., the Play Store) was out of the question, given that the device lacked a traditional display. 

We worked with them to see if Esper could fit the bill.

Square Peg Android

This customer built and maintained its own AOSP-based ROM image. They were forward thinking enough to know they did not want to burn engineering resources on building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to manage their devices. Better things for them to spend their superpowers on.

No Android MDM supplier provided what they needed out of the box. The key requirement was that their OS be aware of the state of the MDM starting immediately with the provisioning process. During provisioning, where an MDM takes over as device owner on Android, specific screens display associated prompts that guide and execute the provisioning process. Since this PTT device didn’t have a traditional touchscreen, that presented a problem.

This customer still needed provisioning, but it had to work with the device’s tiny OLED display — that’s all it had. Luckily, they contacted Esper.

Fitting the OLED Bill

We have a crew that loves NPD and pioneering use cases. So we huddled with the customer (then but a prospect) and schemed how to apply our existing device management infrastructure and modify our Esper Agent to serve their needs on a near-headless device.

We started with Esper’s Seamless provisioning. Seamless allowed the customer to have a provisioning process that required no screen touches and could be completely cloud-driven using IMEIs as the unique identifiers. It also lets them completely manage their fleet using automation and be ready as soon as the factory shares the manufacturing manifest with the associated IMEIs. Combined with baking specific Wi-Fi access point credentials into the OS image in staging, the devices were ready to onboard to Esper’s device management system the second they’re powered on.

The customer worked with multiple operator networks, including specialized cellular systems for first responders. Their end customers also had particular requirements relative to the PTT app used and configuring the pre-deployed devices for the end customer's IT infrastructure. That’s where Esper’s Blueprints came into play, allowing them to define the appropriate Blueprint for the combination of the operator network and end customer requirements — even before the devices were manufactured at the factory! By using IMEIs, we can precisely map the configuration of every device. They just needed to be turned on at staging, and Esper took care of the rest.

Now, we get into the lack of a standard Android touchscreen display! Since our customer wholly owns the device, including the OS, they control what the OLED displays. We exposed provisioning events and status from the Esper Agent to the customer’s OS, and they took it from there. Essentially, we made the Esper Agent communicative with the operating system when this part of device management is normally a completely closed on-device system. 

During normal provisioning on a standard Android device, if there is no internet connection, our provisioning screen will tell you that. Or if an Internet connection was established, provisioning is in progress, etc. For this solution, we designed the Esper Agent to communicate directly with the OS via a proprietary interface communicating such states. Their OS would then do what it needed: display the appropriate message via the OLED display. They own that display and the OS; they just needed to know the status from the Esper Agent and would take care of driving the OLED. 

Behind the curtain, this did present a bit of a challenge for us — this is a specialized Esper Agent designed only for this OS variant and device use case. Yet our main agent is frequently updated to keep pace with the end-to-end innovation driven by the Esper DevOps infrastructure. The Esper engineering team used this as an opportunity to modify our Esper Agent build and maintenance process to let us efficiently maintain, validate, and deliver on this specialized agent while still aligning with our main Esper Agent code base. Very nice!

From this, the customer could use Esper’s App Cloud and app management infrastructure to load and maintain the PTT app set to meet particular customer requirements. Esper’s infrastructure was (and still is) the main driver of this customer’s service delivery and, ultimately, the core use case. 

Certain use cases also required the customer to ship unmanaged devices. We were able to accommodate that as well by adding a validation service to our end-to-end system to check if the device had opted out of device management and could just be an unmanaged device. Of course, in that case, the device would not be provisioned.

The wild thing is remote control still works! It is still an Android device, it uses the Esper Launcher under the hood, and you can work with the device via remote control just as you can any other normal Android device. This was super handy for the customer to troubleshoot.

We needed additional lifts that benefited both the customer and the Esper infrastructure — specifically, making sure their device smoothly onboarded and functioned on the cellular networks used by first responders, including AT&T FirstNet. There was a lot of back and forth to get the solution smoothly operating on these stringent cellular network environments. We were good — as with any NPD, you will always run into these challenges, we are game for them (with the proper build and support contract in place, of course!).

Conclusion

Despite having a very unusual device, we were able to apply our existing Seamless Provisioning infrastructure and then modify our Esper Agent to fit the needs of their end-to-end solution. This enabled our customer to use our infrastructure and focus their engineers on their true engineering value adds. Our deep experience enabled us to fit into the NPD appropriately and be partners to help them get through the launch and the tough operational aspects that go along with their particular target customer set.

The result is Esper now has an advanced cellular first responder communications device utilizing our infrastructure at the core of the solution running on and sold directly through FirstNet, AT&T, Verizon, TMobile, USCellular, and Bell Canada.

Just like Taylor Swift, this device made an appearance at the Super Bowl! FirstNet used it for secure communications on-site and functioned like a champ — a Super Bowl one at that!

If you have any unusual requirements from a device management and infrastructure perspective, please reach out to us. We’d love to see what we can do and how we can help.