The HTC Legend Android Phone with the Sense UI
HTC has been hiring workers for developing a mobile app store of its own. This piece of information was deduced from the number of people HTC is hiring to build Android apps, to build the store itself and to curate the content. The news of this hiring was brought to light by The Financial Times, who reportedly have some sources on the inside who are passing this information to them.
Programmer Joe Hewitt is well known for is work on the Firefox browser and for developing the Facebook iPhone app for Apple’s [NASDAQ:APPL] iOS platform. But more recently he became famous for quitting all software development on the iOS and really slamming Apple for having a closed ecosystem with gatekeepers (the app review process). His quitting the platform was highlighted throughout the tech media and was headlining news for quite some time. Especially because that was the same time when Apple was under a lot of pressure for doing a shoddy job of the review process.
`
With the proliferation of Android and no lock on the source/s from which an app can be installed, malicious apps are slowly making there way in to the Android app ecosystem that resides outside the Google-run MarketPlace for Android Apps. After a recent scare where a lot of Android apps were found to suspicious and downright malicious, Kaspersky Labs (the people who make the Kaspersky suite security software) have found an Android app that is blatantly malicious.
A security firm has been busy scrutinizing Android Apps that are offered at the Android Marketplace and they have come to the conclusion that about 29 of them have deep enough system access to be considered malware on normal PC’s. The report from these analysts also suggests that there are also thousands of other apps that access which does not classify them as threats but do cause them to look suspicious. In the mean time, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has executed a remote app kill for the first time in the history of the Android OS. They had to do this when they deemed it necessary to remove to Android apps completely out of existence.
