How a Radical App Integration Strategy Revolutionized Mobile Security at Meccafame

I just need to take a little bit of hot water. My throat is not completely healed, so I have a little.

Sure, um, Just give me a minute here so that uh yes, of course. Just a minute, please, yeah.

Just give me a second, yeah, yep. Oh So there are a couple of uh Examples which are coming to my mind and one of the interesting thing which is, which I'm thinking about right now, I'll just uh think out loud so that and then I'll I'll elaborate on that. So, uh, when I got recruited into Meccafame, Mcafame provides 4 different mobile apps, uh, 4 different products. They are completely different products which have. Overlapping um features to the end customer. So my job was to unite all this uh to uh to integrate all these four mobile applications under a single hood and provide something called a one app that is all it would be a single application which would provide all the features of this 4 applications. The reason was, uh, the reason was uh. When a particular customer bought a single application, uh, or two applications, there were overlap of features, and, uh, customers didn't want to pay for, uh, for the same features which are available in, in, in, in other applications in, uh, in the, in the, in the, uh, the second application that they have bought. So this was the main ask. So this was,

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Absolutely. So these are the mobile applications. So primarily what they do, one of the prime aspects that they do is, uh, antivirus scanning and all everything about the security of, uh, of the mobile application of the mobile, uh, everything which goes on in the mobile. So this is what uh they do and they do some of them provide uh uh uh family protections and quite a lot of things, uh, a lot of features which are around that which go around that. it. So that's what it does. So my work was to unite all of them, um, and, uh, uh, it was pretty complicated because, uh, we had to first of all come up with a technical technically it was complicated because we had to come up with a, uh, architecture which was, uh, which. We should unite all these applications without having one application, uh, uh, knowing about the other applications. So we created a, uh, completely, uh, we created, we borrowed from the microservices architecture of, uh, the, um, web, and then we created a layer which could unite all these applications very seamlessly, and all these applications could provide APS without other applications and these applications would call each other, but while doing. So we found that uh most of these applications had we we could primarily bring out a lot of uh features which are replicated in these applications, for example, uh, the, the network, the way each of this uh uh we could unify a lot of things like uh uh the way they hit the network so we primarily identified a couple of services which were uh going common throughout all these applications, brought them all out. Uh, we, while doing so, all these, uh, services which are common, we identified them as libraries and then created a complete different libraries. Uh, one of the library that we, uh, envisioned while doing that was called the Analytics library, and this analytics library became a pretty huge hit with a lot of people because the way it was designed, it was so, uh, it was pretty easy to, uh, integrate with other people. Not only was, uh, this a library which was used for the mobile applications, but it was also a library which was used for all the other applications of, uh, I mean, it was ported into Linux, Windows, and other things for, uh, uh, for Mac FM, so. Uh, first thing is there, there were quite a lot of complications. The first complication that we, uh, did is on the technical side, how do we do this? And then, uh, studying all these, uh, 4 products and understanding what are the common features, bringing out the, uh, libraries out. This is the second, uh, complication which was them. Apart from that, interacting with all these 4 teams, hitting it out well with them in that to a certain extent so that we, uh, they buy our, uh, and they agree, we get their blessings primarily on, um, uh. On making changes in their application. So this was the 3rd complication that we brought, uh, that we had, um,

Yeah, the, the first one was about, uh, how do we do it, how do we unite all these applications. Second thing was about how do we, uh, eliminate the, uh, eliminate, uh, uh, eliminate the components which were getting replicated in completely different ways, generally, uh, bring about the standardization of the components which were getting, uh, replicated in all these, uh, 4. Behemoth

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thing was the 3rd thing was, uh, you cannot make the changes in the product unless you get the blessings of the people who have been in this product. So, so we have to, uh, we have to hit on a good rapport with them and then make them understand it. So on this. Front, there were quite a lot of people skills which were necessary. First, to get the details from them. Second, to make them understand the value that would come up from uh basically standardizing all the things, all the common things amongst all these applications. So these are the three things which are very complicated. The 1st, 1st, the technical complication, uh, the first aspect, the technical aspects. Um, there's nothing in the market which does it like that, but, so we had to invent our own frameworks and, uh, by using whatever is available, uh, that was a that was, that, uh, that was, uh, very successful. We could, uh, uh, most of the architects and very, uh, top level folks who saw it, they were very impressed by it, um. So, uh, we had a lot of talking to do.

Mhm, uh, so the first aspect which we said, the technical aspect that itself was complicated because nobody has seen such a kind of, uh, uh, the framework that we made, nobody has seen such a kind of a framework. First developing the framework, there was a lot of technical complexity in developing the framework to an extent that it became very, very general and very, very, very easy to use. So selling, selling this, um, value proposition of it was a little complicated because people wanted to know how this entire framework was going on, uh, working. So when we started explaining how it was working. Um, most of them were like, yeah, it does the job. It does the, it, it means most of the, it, uh, does the checkbox, it's the checkboxes and most of the things, but it's way too complicated. So we had to show them it is not that complicated. Only the thing is they were not used to this kind of a way of uh working on it. This is one thing, um, so this is radically different because no, no, none of the, uh, none of the mobile applications or none of the things, uh, which are there in the market uses such a kind of framework. This was completely proprietary, proprietortarily, uh, developed for Micro frame for this particular work and which suits this applica, uh, this, uh, needs of the, for uniting all the four by mouth applications. So this is one, Radically different thing which, which we figured out here. And then uh we had to convince a lot of folks in doing this. First thing is this. Second thing is, uh, well, uh, we had to discover a lot of common components. Once we started discovering a lot of common components, and then we wanted to pull them out as, uh, um, services which would standalone services, then, um, people felt it was an unnecessary reinvention of the wheel, but they said, uh, once all as. As the things are already there in place and they are in stable fashion, why would, uh, you like to pull them out and then make them in a better way, put them into a, uh, uh, uh, put them into a different services of their own, a standalone services which can be used throughout. So they felt once, uh, it's a mobile device. So once you have what, um, 10, um, huge number of, uh, um. Uh, a huge number of, uh, uh, you know, modules trying to use the same service, it might create a lot of load on this, on that service, and it has, it might have to be redesigned or done in a far better way. So explaining the value proposition of it and then really implementing it was a radical complete new different approach actually.

So when we were discovering it, it was not only a very new to the organization, it was, uh, it was not there in the market because I have been working in the, um, field and I've been doing this job for a long time. It was never there in the market or in any of the, it has never been used at all. So what gave me confidence was that, uh, it. Basically, we, um, there are a couple of things. Primarily the thing is it makes sure that none of the application knows anything about the other application. Every application, there are a couple of such checkboxes, such as a couple of such checkboxes. Everything makes, uh, good. That is what is our, uh, uh, that's what from, uh. Through them we came to understand that uh uh this is a pretty good 111 of the things is normally when you uh integrate applications, one of the application has to uh uh might have to know something about the other application. There is a little bit of a, uh, you know, that, uh, uh, it has to at least it has to interface with that application, but this frameworks make sure that. This application has absolutely nothing to know about this application. It just, uh, uh, publishes its services. There's another part of it which, uh, just, uh, attaches to the, uh, services without getting any class of this thing. I mean, basically, uh no, uh, flow, uh, uh, basically there's complete, uh, uh, separation of concerns which were happening here. So this is one thing. Second thing was that, uh, it was pretty easy to integrate. In the framework, it will, uh, developing the framework was a little complicated, but integration part was, uh, I mean just a snap. It was so easy to integrate a completely different applications. So this is what gave me, uh, gave us the confidence in doing so we integrated and uh showed some of the examples of how, how it would work.

Sure. Uh, so, As far as I see, a couple of things have to be considered for this. First thing is the maintainability of it. So, when, uh, once, uh, how, how is it, is it to maintain? How, how, what, uh, that is, if a bug happens, then, uh. Um, How easy, uh, how easily we can figure out where the bug happens and, uh, is it, uh, will it bring out the entire, bring down the entire system or not? So, this was one of the, uh, ways of measuring the success. Second thing was reduction in, in the number of lines of code and, uh, uh, reduction in the number of lines of code and making the entire 4, different applications work like, uh, work seamlessly, um, work seamlessly and at the same time, um. Making sure that all the common, common elements are, uh, gathered are available as different services. This is what was our primarily maintainability was very, uh, high. That was one of the factors. And this, yeah, that's what, uh, that is one of the prime uh factors primarily.

The, yeah,