[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zipshare - one-step Android screen sharing ...
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Show HN: Zipshare - one-step Android screen sharing for support
teams
Hello HN community! I work as an Android developer at a large
retailer, on the app that the in-store employees use to see their
schedules, view product details, get support, etc. Part of our
engineering on-call rotation involves helping these in-store
employees with any app issues they may encounter. There are always
a few times every rotation where I know solving someone's problem
would be way easier if I could just see their screen as if I were
in-store with them. However, many of these employees are non-
technical and wouldn't want to go through the onboarding of
TeamViewer or Zoom, are under time constraints in a busy store, or
(understandably) just wouldn't know how to get set up. As a side
project over the past few weekends, I've been building an Android
screen sharing tool called Zipshare (https://www.getzipshare.com,
demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuc3HBIuMZE) that aims
to be absolutely as easy as possible to use for the person sharing
their screen. All the sharer needs to do is receive an email (or
eventually a text) on their Android device and click a link. They
will be sent to the Play Store, and upon launching the app, will
automatically be sent to their session. Users don't need to create
an account or enter a meeting code - there's literally one screen
in the app ("xyz@abc.com invited you to share your screen, would
you like to?") In fact, I originally wanted to use Play Store
Instant Apps to eliminate the installation step entirely, but you
can't open a raw socket from an Instant App, which I currently
depend on... [1] You can try the live demo by entering your email
address and waiting on the next page, while clicking the link you
receive on an Android device. Allow the screen share and you'll see
it appear in your browser on the first device. When this is more
built out, support agents will be able to sign in to their account
and click a button to generate a new link/send it out. I also want
to integrate with platforms like ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Zendesk
to allow generating screen sharing sessions directly from tickets.
I focused on Android for this initial version because the wide
variety of devices makes giving support more difficult than on iOS,
and because I have way more experience with Android :) Other
features I want to include are automatic notification suppression
while sharing (for privacy), an "instant connectivity check" that
reports basic system state to the agent like cell/Wi-Fi signal
strength and whether a VPN is enabled, and an annotation feature so
that agents can draw attention to certain areas of the screen. My
goal with Zipshare was to do one thing and make the experience as
streamlined as possible. For example, there's no voice or video
calling because chances are the two parties will already be on some
other kind of call. Technical details: * Screen sharing: WebRTC
with signaling provided by a self-hosted LiveKit server instance *
Android side: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, LiveKit SDK, Play Store
Referrer API to route the session ID through to the app install,
"classic" Android 3rd party libraries (OkHttp, Retrofit, KotlinX
serialization, ...) * Website and API: Node.js, Express, two Pug
templates, one CSS file, 50ish lines of JS excluding LiveKit,
SQLite DB with one table. Design details: * Icon: Fiverr *
Colors: ChatGPT * Landing page copy: The best I could come up with
Please give it a try and let me know what you think! I am eager to
test this on as many devices as possible, especially older or low-
end devices. I built this because I wanted it, but would it be
useful for you or your team? Any feature requests? [1]
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/191070661, naturally "Won't
Fix", definitely something to hack around in the future (note: I
was given the OK to repost this for a second chance)
Author : mlaux
Score : 10 points
Date : 2024-12-18 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.getzipshare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.getzipshare.com)
| tehlike wrote:
| It looks like Chrome Mobile might support it soon (with some
| loose definition of soon).
|
| https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40418135
|
| So you may be able to cut another step from the workflow!
|
| Good work, I really like this kind of effortless screensharing.
| It unlocks new ways of helping people (helping family, etc).
| mlaux wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out! I'll keep an eye on this issue. As
| much as I love native apps, for something like this where the
| fewer steps the better, doing everything in the browser would
| definitely be an advantage.
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(page generated 2024-12-18 23:01 UTC)