Right, it's a hard problem to solve. A camera-based approach would be invasive, impractical, and really easily duped. But now we have bluetooth cubes.
Bluetooth cubes still have a ways to go before they're physically good enough and also affordable enough to replace regular cubes, but they will solve this issue. CubeDesk already supports a few types of BT cubes. When you use a BT cube on CubeDesk, you get a breakdown of every stage, turns per second, areas you paused, etc.
The unfortunate thing about BT cubes is that all the companies making them have their own proprietary software that they want their customers to use, so they encode the data coming from the cube to make it really hard for anyone to make sense of it. Some of us in the cubing dev world have reversed engineered these techniques, but it's just unfortunate how they try to keep it a secret.
My first reaction glancing at the site was "Bluetooth Rubik's Cube". I could confirm in seconds that such cubes exist, but minutes spent spelunking the site gave no evidence that CubeDesk had even considered this issue.
Then I opened the answer key (HN comments) and found this thread. Shouldn't you make it easier to find documentation before signing up?
I'm working on it. I recently redesigned the landing page and plan on adding more info soon. I don't work on CubeDesk full time so it's mostly after work or weekends when I can make improvements. I'd like to add a whole help/docs section soon with all this info.
Bluetooth cubes still have a ways to go before they're physically good enough and also affordable enough to replace regular cubes, but they will solve this issue. CubeDesk already supports a few types of BT cubes. When you use a BT cube on CubeDesk, you get a breakdown of every stage, turns per second, areas you paused, etc.
The unfortunate thing about BT cubes is that all the companies making them have their own proprietary software that they want their customers to use, so they encode the data coming from the cube to make it really hard for anyone to make sense of it. Some of us in the cubing dev world have reversed engineered these techniques, but it's just unfortunate how they try to keep it a secret.