The App Store of Malware (I mean, Banned Apps)
Having just finished Steve Jobs biography, and being of the school of gated platforms – at least for my phone, where I don’t want to deal with bugs the way I might in my work laptop (sorry Matt B and the uTest IT team) – I found this concept very interesting.
According to the BI article, “Android Hackers Plan App Store of Banned Apps,” a group of Android Developers are looking to start their own app store for all the banned and rejected apps that didn’t make the cut. The article includes a quote from the potential founder that, “apps removed from the Market include, one-click root apps, emulators, tether apps, Visual Voicemail apps, and more.”
It sounds great but we already know about the growing number of malware on phone operating systems, the Android especially. The other alternative for apps is to create mobile-specific landing pages (i.e. HTML5 apps), like Grooveshark (music) and Untappd (beer reviews) have done, making the apps available via your mobile browser. Since their launch, Untappd has launched a native app for iOS and Android but has not shared details on traffic comparisons. [It won’t be applicable to most mobile users but we cover some security exploits and common attacks in our Security Testing whitepaper.]
Am I the only one uber-sensitive about the integrity of my phones OS and Apps? Would you download an app that isn’t scrutinized for security?
