Version 7.4.1¶
- Release Date
November, 23rd 2020
- Compatibility
Android 5 (Lollipop), Android 6 (Marshmallow), Android 7 and 7.1 (Nougat), Android 8 and 8.1 (Oreo), Android 9.0 (Pie), Android 10.0
This is a standard maintenance release with enhanced support for the National Convention 2021. In addition, it will store your personal password in a more secure way.
What’s New¶
Events¶
Support for the upcoming National Convention 2021 has been enhanced and now properly shows the start and end time of meta-events:
Security¶
1 The password you use to authenticate is now encrypted with a cipher key stored in the Android KeyStore.
On Android 6 (Marshmallow) and newer, an AES key is obtained from the Android KeyStore and used with an AES/GCM/NoPadding cipher to encrypt the password before it is stored in a shared preferences file.
On Android 5 (Lollipop), the Android KeyStore only supports storing RSA keys, which is used with an RSA/ECB/PKCS1Padding cipher to encrypt an AES key (randomly generated at runtime) and stored in the shared preferences files under the key SecureStorageKey, if one has not already been generated.
Note
If a device upgrades from Android 5 (Lollipop) to a newer version of the operating system, the type of encryption will continue to be used unless the app is uninstalled. But it is worth mentioning that most LionsBase users are running much newer versions of Android already.
Some words about Auto Backup for Apps. Auto Backup for Apps is a feature of Android 6.0 and later that backs up user’s app data (shared preferences, files in the app’s internal storage, and other specific files). Data is restored when an app is reinstalled or installed on a new device. This could possibly impact the secure storage of your user password which utilizes share preferences that are backed up and can not be decrypted when the restore occurs. But we took an extra step to configure an exception in the backup strategy so that this Auto Backup never includes your password.
News¶
Since we introduced news in the dashboard (back in Version 2.4.0), only public news created in your club website were included in the LionsBase mobile application.
This restriction has been lifted; this means that your webmaster may now create news only visible to authenticated members. Another enhancement is that the mobile application now supports news which are configured as a redirect to an internal page or to an external website.
Other Changes¶
In addition, a few bugs have been squashed and minor enhancements integrated:
under some circumstances, trying to access a club website using a silent authentication could lead to an error in the application showing “http:// Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed”. We found a bug in the API for LionsBase Austria and fixed it right away (thanks to O. Krauss for reporting the problem). Finally, we took an extra step to be always on the safe side and ensure this bug could not occur anymore in case of a problem with the LionsBase API;
when opening your club website, we now show a short notification asking you to wait a bit until the loading of the website. This is useful since opening the preparation of the silent authentication link to your website lasts a few seconds and we thought it was worth giving you a short feedback;
the colors of the user interface have been standardised;
various internal libraries have been upgraded.
Footnotes
- 1
Information in this section is adapted from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/essentials/secure-storage?tabs=android
About the Large Compatibility with Versions of Android¶
As you see, we do our best to keep compatibility with rather old versions of Android (Android 5 - Lollipop dates back from November 2014 and this represents a gigantic jump in the past in the IT world).
If we keep such old compatibility (compared to Apple users), this is related to a very unfortunate fact that Android smartphones and tablets are usually maintained much less than Apple ones. In fact, manufacturers such as Samsung are selling their devices with (usually) the latest available version of Android at that time (but often with the previous one) and provide major updates of the system for something that we estimate for about 2 years in contrast to Apple which supports its devices for as long as 5 to 6 years. We understand that LionsBase application users do not see any need to get a new device every 2 to 3 years (which is totally legit) and as such, we strive to keep compatibility as long as we can.
As problems arise due to this compatibility and as the number of people still actively using older devices decreases, we may drop support for some older versions at any time.
Note
Using iOS? Please see corresponding release notes.