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September 2010

09/30/2010

Horace Dediu on ?Non-Google? Android Phones

Horace Dediu, on the fact that all iPhones ship with apps that use Google services, but some (many?) Android phones don't:

In other words, is Google?s income from the iPhone offsetting its losses from Android?

That's a cheeky way to put it. Another way to look at it is that Google is in a great position: they win if Android wins, and they win if iPhone wins. And I don't think it's a zero sum game where only one platform will “win” — it's looking to me like both the iPhone and Android are winners, which is good news all around for Google. It's sort of like Microsoft and the Mac — Microsoft makes money when you buy a Windows PC, and they make money when you buy Office for Mac.

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Keep Enemies Close: Microsoft Needs iPhone Apps

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Study: Android Apps Sending Private Data To Advertisers - Yahoo! News

Some applications based on the open-source Android operating system are secretly opening up too much to advertisers. That's the word from a new study conducted by a research team from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs.

The study was conducted using the team's new, real-time privacy monitoring tool, TaintDroid. The team reported that TaintDroid was used to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, and it discovered 68 instances of "potential misuse of users' private information across 20 applications."

'Coarse-Grained Controls'

The team noted that many Android apps, as well as those for other smartphones such as Apple's iPhone, grab data from remote cloud services and combine that with data with local sensors, such as a GPS receiver, a camera, a microphone, or an accelerometer. This creates useful and legitimate functions for owners, the study noted, but sometimes private information is sent back to the cloud.

The study cited the hypothetical example of a user who allows her location information to be used by an application, but, because only "coarse-grained controls" are available, the user has no way of knowing that her location information will be sent to a location-based service, to advertisers, to the application developers, or to others.


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p2pnet news » Blog Archive » Android apps 'misuse private information'

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Android App Spygate: Tips to Put an End to Spying Apps - Yahoo! News

Worried your Android apps are spying on you? You should be, according to a recent study that found several popular Android Apps regularly share your location and critical phone data such as your phone number with advertisers and others. Researchers from Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University randomly selected 30 out of 358 popular apps from the Android Market for this study. The computer scientists were able to track each application's behavior using a special monitoring program called TaintDroid developed by the researchers.

Here's a breakdown of the researcher's findings:

-15 popular Android apps sent location information to advertisers without requiring user consent

-9 apps transmitted a user's International Mobile Equipment Identity number, a unique device identifier

-7 out of those 9 apps did not mention IMEI collection in their End User License Agreements including one unnamed popular social networking app and one unnamed location-based search application


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Android News Releases: The Dealmap Brings Award Winning Mobile Application to Android Users

The Dealmap Brings Award Winning Mobile Application to Android Users

The Dealmap Brings Award Winning Mobile Application to Android Users

First Android App to Aggregate Local Daily Deals in One Place

MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The Dealmap(TM) (http://www.thedealmap.com), the most comprehensive source for consumers to find and share local deals, today announced its mobile application is available to download on Android(TM) Market. The Dealmap app gives Android users the most comprehensive view of nearby local deals, and is the only app to aggregate daily deals from nearly 100 sources, all in one place. The launch of The Dealmap's Android app follows the successful introduction of its app for the iPhone, which was named one of Gizmodo's "Apps of the Week" and has been installed by more than 175,000 people in its first six weeks.


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Tango launches 3G and WiFi video calling on iOS and Android, no account required

Today at San Francisco's Mobilize conference, a company by the name of Tango launched its video calling application, appropriately called... yes, "Tango." Like Fring, it's available for both iOS and Android devices, and handles calls over 3G and WiFi. Like FaceTime, no account is required to initiate calls.

We chatted with Eric Setton, CTO of Tango, who gave us a demo of the application (on video) using an iPhone 4 and EVO 4G. We also tested Tango by installing the application on an iPhone 4 and Nexus One, and it works as advertised -- although it only appears to initiate calls with people already in your contact list. Tango relies on the XMPP protocol used by Jabber and Google Talk to initiate calls via a centralized server, but the actual calls are peer-to-peer over 3G and WiFi. Call quality scales dynamically with connection performance. Currently, the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and 4th generation iPod touch are supported, as well as devices running Android 2.1 and higher (not 2.0 as mentioned in the video).

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you -- and remember, it takes two to tango. Follow the break for the video demo!


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Is your Android phone spying on you? | ITworld

Got an Android phone? Installed apps from the Android Market? Congratulations, you have been named the Mayor of We Know Where You Went and What You Did Last Week.

Even if you never use services like Foursquare or Facebook Places or Google Latitude to announce your physical location to the world, the apps you have installed may be capturing this information and sharing it with advertisers -- without your knowledge or consent.

[ See also: Warning: Fake LinkedIn spam can steal your bank passwords ]

 
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Android Developers Blog: More Countries, More sellers, More buyers

, Android, and the Licensing Server
  • Supporting the new music Voice Action
  • Screen Geometry Fun
  • One Screen Turn Deserves Another
  • Brace for the Future
  • Securing Android LVL Applications


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    James Purser: Android Market opens up to Aussie Devs

    If you've been anything like a regular reader of this blog, you'll have noticed that I've had a couple of rants about the fact that Google has been tardy in allowing developers from outside a very narrow range of countries to sell applications through the Android Marketplace. Up until now this list has excluded nations such as Australia and Canada, two nations where you would think that Google would recognise the depth of potential developer support.

    Well yesterday Google announced that it was going to be adding 18 countries to the list of those able to actually sell apps. This includes Australia, Canada, Israel and Hong Kong. All nations with small but agile software development industries that will only benefit from the new market.

    So w00t for the fact that now I can sell apps through the market place. Now all I need to do is come up with that killer app :)

    I can only hope that they've learnt the lesson from this and that the upcoming Chrome App Store and Google TV App Store will be able to open with a much wider range of supported countries.


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