Archive for the 'Android' Category

Android Popularity

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

IDC has new Worldwide statistics that show for Q1 2013 Android and iOS represented 92.3% of all smartphone OS Shipments. Android had a 75% market share, iOS 17.3%, Windows Phone 3.2% and BlackBerry 2.9%.
 

From my perspective, as predominantly an Android developer, I can see Android has ‘grown up’. Companies are no longer going iOS first […]

Android Anti-Virus Software Prone to Transformation Attacks

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Security Week has an interesting article on Android anti-virus software. In summary, most Android anti-virus software relies on signature based analysis that’s easily fooled using simple obfuscation techniques. Obfuscation is more usually used by developers to hide source code from hackers but it can be used by the hackers themselves to transform code into new […]

IDC Tablet Sales Stats Show Android More Popular than iOS

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

IDC has some new statistics on Q1 tablet shipments showing that Android is, for the first time, more popular (56.6%) than iOS (39.6%). These market share numbers are similar to those previously reported by Strategy Analytics and also demonstrate that Microsoft’s tablet strategy was flawed.
 

Geo-based Android Phone Statistics

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Last March I wrote about choosing Android devices for testing and explained how this should partly depend on the geographic region you are targeting. Consequently, I always find it interesting to see what vendors, other than my immediate clients, are seeing as the most popular phones in particular geographic regions.
Animoca has some useful new […]

Tablet Market Share

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Strategy Analytics has useful new research that shows that global tablet sales increased by 117 perent in Q1/2013 compared to the Q1/2012. Android is catching up with iOS…

For some reason Strategy Analytics have chosen to exclude white-box tablets in the above figures. If you include white-box tablets, "Android market share of the total tablet market […]

App Vulnerabilities

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Veracode have a new report on the State of Software Security (requires registration) that makes interesting reading for mobile developers. Of particular concern is that cryptographic issues still affect a sizeable portion of Android (64%) and iOS (58%) applications. Hard-coding a cryptographic key directly into the mobile application is common. 

Here’s the distribution of vulnerabilities across iOS […]

Alternative Android App Stores

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

I have been doing some research on alternative Android app stores. Most of my clients tend to stick with the Google Play store but I know one or two individual developers, who publish their own apps, who actually avoid the Play store as it has reputation for lack of visibility and piracy. So what are […]

App Stats

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Canalys has a new report on the app stores across 50 countries. Quarterly growth was 11% in Q1 2013, compared to 2012. Revenue from paid apps, in-app purchases and subscriptions combined grew by 9%. There were more than 13.4 billion downloads in total. Apple’s App Store accounted for 74% of revenues while the Google Play […]