Someone named “Dashaa N” has posted a video “How to install Survey Solutions Interviewer App” on YouTube yesterday, outlining the process of installing an Interviewer App on the mobile device.
I don’t know who that person is and I will not be linking directly to the video not to popularize it, but if you bump into that video, please note that:
This process as shown is incorrect and is dangerous.
The dangers are of two kinds and are both coming from the same error that the user is supposed to do based on the instructions shown in the video, which is to rely on a Google search to locate the Interviewer App.
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Malicious users can affect the Google’s page rank by creating traffic to a fake app, and the user that selects the top search result will be then installing the malicious code (and since the author of the video has shown how to except this from the default blocking of Android, this will succeed). This is not unheard of (see e.g. French military victories or Google bombing in general). From that point on the damage can be pretty much anything that the malicious user intended to do.
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Even if the user installing the Interviewer App gets lucky and the apk that he/she downloads and installs is indeed the Interviewer App for Survey Solutions, there is still danger that the App is from a different server, that is incompatible with the server that the user needs to collect and exchange data with. In the worst case (when doing an update) the user may lock himself in, with data stuck in the tablet and not being able to send it to the server. These cases have happened already in the past and reported in this forum, see for example, here.
In short: only download the Interviewer App from the server you intend to send the data to. Get there by typing the address in the browser’s address line. The address of the server you get from your survey coordinator.
If your mobile device has a QR-code recognizer, downloading the app is even easier by scanning the code shown on the server page and following the link. This will reduce a chance of a typo in the address of the server and this is why it is displayed there.
Best, Sergiy