The Android Devices Blog

Sometimes when I look back a few years, I become a bit nostalgic about how easy it was back then to keep a mobile device secure. When all a phone did was… well, make phone calls and maybe send and receive text messages, all one needed to worry about was keeping the phone physically secure (i.e. in your hand or pocket). The only connections were to the mobile service provider to establish a voice or SMS connection. Not much could have happened there.

Then came Bluetooth and with it came the first round of security problems. Now why anyone would keep Bluetooth switched on all the time is a bit of a mystery to me anyway (considering the amount of battery drain), but people did come up with sophisticated solutions that would allow reading or changing someone’s address book or even making calls through someone’s phone from quite a few meters distance. Still, it was something that was quite easily mitigated by either switching Bluetooth off (if not needed) or at least making sure it didn’t accept just any connection.

Today all this has changed dramatically. Phones are no longer just phones, they are little computers with most of the capabilities of modern desktop computers and they even have at least equally good connectivity. The problem is that with those capabilities come certain risks – and it seems like parts of the industry are not sufficiently aware of them, and much less the users. It’s either that or they don’t care. Apple for example has come under a bit of fire recently when it failed to provide security updates to the Safari browser for the iPhone.

(more…)

I found an interesting article today by someone who has already installed Android on the Nokia N810 and noticed the XMPP service that’s running on it. He compares that to the iPhone, where chat applications are only available through the browser (which makes you unavailable as soon as you switch to another site or application). Now my iPhone contract here in Germany doesn’t even allow me to use Instant Messaging, but I would find it very annoying to have to go into “IM mode” in order to use IM on my phone. It’s really something, same as email, that needs to be running in the background, showing me as available and prompting me for attention when necessary, to make it worthwhile.

There is hope that an open platform like Android won’t repeat the mistakes that Apple is making. If there is the same amount of hope that carriers will actually allow the use of really useful applications on their networks is a different question. But of course a phone that can actually make use of all these things will make it a lot more obvious that carriers are restricting what their customers can do to protect their revenue stream from ridiculously overpriced text messages.