Thank you Avast for this wonderful piece of software. I have two feature requests. Hoping for an answer on when and if will be implemented.
Screen stays on while phone is locked:
When the phone is locked, the screen will stay on until someone physically presses the power button. For the cases that the phone is lost and not stolen, this drains the phone’s battery very fast reducing the available time someone has to successfully track the phone and retrieve it. If this feature is there to facilitate finding the phone in dark/dim places, the siren can cover that case without problems. I would prefer the screen to follow the predefined timeout setting and turn off to preserve battery for GPS tracking and other very useful features. If the phone is lost and the battery dies before the owner can reach it, its probably lost forever. As an example my phone’s battery will last at least three times longer with the display off.
SD card wipe feature missing:
This is a very important feature. Once the phone is locked, a potential thieve will have to erase all data from the phone to access it, which secures the data that resides in phone’s memory. However, most sensitive information are usually found in the SD card which will survive any action performed by the thieve. I think this is a must have feature and it can already be found in many similar solutions of the competition.
Will any of the above be considered/implemented at some point?
Thank you.
as for the wipe - you can send a wipe command yourself to clear the SD card:
Wiping the phone can also be carried out by SMS command (Sample: 2222 WIPE),
if you do not expect to get your phone back and you do not want the thief to be able to access your personal data.
Up to Android 2.1, the wipe is somewhat restricted as a factory reset of the phone is not possible. However, Anti-Theft will try to delete as much as possible, for example contacts, call logs, SMS/MMS, browser history and SD card content, but not emails or apps. From Android 2.2 onwards, a full factory reset is possible so you have full wipe capabilities.
However please be aware that this will also delete avast! Anti-Theft, unless it was installed
as a rooted application. To do a full wipe, Anti-Theft needs to be configured in the advanced
settings as a device administrator, otherwise applications, emails etc will not be deleted.
Whenever Anti-Theft wipes the phone, any SD cards will also be deleted. When doing a
standard wipe, only the file directory would be deleted. This is the fastest way, but
sophisticated thieves would be able to restore the deleted data using special tools.
The thorough wipe will take up to ten minutes, but will physically and irrecoverably delete
the actual contents of your SD card. It is your choice whether to select the maximum level of
security by using the thorough wipe option.
So is the “wipe” function I can remotely perform on my phone via my Avast! account the same as this ‘Thorough Wipe’ or is it only one of many levels of wiping Avast! can perform? I can’t seem to find this “Thorough Wipe”. Thanks!