Screen Capture Control

Screen capture images of the user interface of an application are a security risk. However, some software development tools rely on screen capture capability. For example, some test automation tools use screen capture to simulate user interaction, or to report results. The BlackBerry Dynamics runtime controls the built-in screen capture capability of Android devices to enable the security risk to be managed without blocking software development activities.

A BlackBerry Dynamics application's user interface (UI) is divided into two parts for the purposes of screen capture control.

The Application User Interface

Screen capture prevention in the general application UI is controlled at run-time by policy setting made in the enterprise BlackBerry Dynamics management console. The BlackBerry Dynamics profile includes a specific Prevent Android Screen Capture flag. If this flag is switched on, then screen capture is prevented. This flag is independent of the other DLP flags. This policy is retrieved and enforced by the runtime.

See also

System administration tasks

The BlackBerry Dynamics Runtime User Interface

The BlackBerry Dynamics runtime UI includes all the screens and other elements that are built in to the runtime. This includes the screens on which the end user sets and enters their security password, for example.

In previous versions, screen capture prevention in the BlackBerry Dynamics runtime UI was controlled by a build-time configuration. The configuration was read from the com.good.gd.debug.json file in the assets/ folder of the application. To switch off screen capture prevention, adding a GDAllowInternalUIScreenCapture attribute and setting its value to true would enable screen capture.

From version 8.0, screen capture within the BlackBerry Dynamics runtime UI is controlled by the same policy setting in the enterprise BlackBerry Dynamics management console as is used for the application user interface. Thus use of GDAllowInternalUIScreenCapture has been deprecated. The only exception to this is any UI screens shown prior to BlackBerry Dynamics authorization where screen capture will always be permitted. This change means screen capture will now be possible when a user enters their activation credentials as this occurs prior to authorization and prior to the runtime receiving policy settings.