TeamViewer announces new Mobile SDK for secure in-app support

TeamViewer introduced the TeamViewer Mobile SDK as part of its Tensor enterprise platform offering. The new product enables companies to integrate TeamViewer’s remote support functions into their own mobile apps as a white label solution while meeting DSGVO requirements.

Users get easily frustrated if an app doesn’t work properly. One way to provide quick support for the application is to remotely access the mobile device to check where the error is. Although possibilities exist for this, many companies are reluctant to offer such a service to their customers for privacy and data protection reasons. After all, the smartphone is nowadays a very private possession.

It must be ensured that support staff cannot see any information outside the app they are supporting – for example in notifications or by switching to the home screen or an application.

With the new Mobile SDK, TeamViewer offers a solution that ensures exactly that: if the smartphone user leaves the app to be supported, the screen contents on the support employee’s side are greyed out. The same applies to notifications. This protects the customer’s privacy and ensures GDPR compliance. The SDK contains a collection of programming tools and libraries that allow developers to integrate the remote support functions of TeamViewer into their app as a white label solution – without much programming effort.

For companies, this means that they do not have to make any compromises, for example in the design of the support process or the corresponding app interface, in order to use the full range of functions. The technology works invisibly in the background.

Alexander Post, Director Product Management at TeamViewer, explains: “Companies increasingly rely on their own apps so that customers can use their products and services on mobile devices. Until now, assistance for problem solutions within the app was usually only possible by displaying an error message and passing it onto the service team. With the TeamViewer Mobile SDK, support becomes interactive. This enables companies to significantly improve the customer experience of their apps and offer remote support – in compliance with data protection regulations, efficiently and without any further effort on the part of the customer”.

If TeamViewer has been integrated into an app using the SDK, the support employee, after setting up a 256-bit AES encrypted, protected connection using an RSA Public/Private Key Exchange, has access to the user’s screen and sees the same as the user – until leaving or closing the application or support session to be supported. In addition, there are – currently exclusively for Android – control options for remote interaction with the app on the customer’s end device.

The TeamViewer Mobile SDK supports iOS 12.0 and Android 5.0 upwards, so it can be used for apps on the most common smartphones. Flexible TeamViewer-supported support is also possible in low-bandwidth environments by using it in mobile networks from the 3rd generation (UMTS). On the developer side, the TeamViewer Mobile SDK supports the usual standard programming languages for the various operating system platforms, i.e. Java and Kotlin for Android and Objective-C & Swift for iOS.