What your apps may be doing

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook reading text messages on mobile platforms. As it turns out, a lot of the apps that may be installed on your phone may be doing this exact same thing. When users install an app from their respective marketplace, they need to be aware of the permissions that the app is requesting. On Android, for instance, an app can ask for the permission to read SMS messages. If that same app has full network communication, it could "possibly" be sending all of your messages to a server to be inspected later.

This is not meant to scare anyone into deleting all of their apps from their phone. Take Handcent SMS to the right for example. An app that needs to display and send text messages obviously needs the permissions to do so. If the Hello Kitty app asked for the same permissions, it should throw a red flag. Users just need to be aware of what their apps are actually asking before installing them.

There is a new law in California that requires developers to post a detailed privacy policy discussing what personal information an app needs and what it plans to do with said data. If this policy is not followed, then the developer can face serious prosecutions. This is a step in the right direction and all states should be implementing this law in order to protect the privacy of this digital age.

Until privacy policies become enforced in all states, just use common sense when installing an application, and be wary of third-party sites offering paid applications for free. Developers will often release a different version of their paid app amongst the pirating sites that have different functionality from the regular app, often leaning on the "I will embarrass you for trying to pirate my app." functionality.

RFID, and what you should know about it.

While this subject is not really recent news, it has been revisited recently due to the cancellation of an episode of the popular television series, MythBusters. The MythBusters wanted to show how easy it was to get the credentials from one of these RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) credit cards with simple items that anyone could obtain. When the crew was called called in by the top legal consultants of every major credit card company, the episode was quickly pulled by the Discovery Channel in order to keep their advertisers happy. But why is this such a touchy subject?

Upon conducting a Google search on "how to hack RFID credit cards," there are plenty of sites that basically give you a step by step list on what you need and how to do it. Anyone with one of these cards should shudder at this, but there are some measures that credit card companies have implemented to battle this. There are authorization methods that generate a transaction number that is only good for a very small amount of time. In other words, if someone were to scan your card and extract the information, he/she would have to use that information gathered almost immediately or it would result in a fraudulent transaction. Another measure is the distance needed to pull the information is usually very small, from one to three inches. So, while the thieves may have your information, you'll quickly receive a phone call from your credit company when they try to use it. There are even wallets with integrated Faraday cages woven into the material to block these hijacks. While these may seem to be workarounds to a very serious problem, it does significantly decrease the chances of losing all of your hard earned cash.

RFID is not going anywhere soon. There are mobile devices that are acting as credit cards at this very moment. The latest android development phone, the Galaxy Nexus, comes equipped with a NFC battery cover (Near Field Communication), which is an extension of RFID technology. This allows users to carry all of their money in one place. While this has it's own security issues, it just proves that this wireless technology is the current direction of consumers.

Is Android fragmentation all that bad?

Android supports a huge range of devices, from 2.5 inch phone screens to full-sized, high-definition television sets. From a user perspective, it's a great way to get your daily dose of app goodness from all of the Android-powered devices you own. For a developer, this can be a nightmare. Different layouts are needed to make an application useful for all of these devices. There are certain APIs that become deprecated over time, while newer APIs become available for newer versions of Android. Keeping track of compatibility issues while retaining the feature set of an application can become an extremely time consuming job.

With the release of Android 3.0 (more commonly known as Honeycomb), new design concepts such as the action bar and on-screen navigation controls became standard. Developers needed to look at their applications to make sure they would scale correctly to fit these much larger devices. In some cases, a different version of the application was released into the market just to cover the tablet user base.

So, if you're a programmer, life has just become a lot more difficult. Because of this range of devices, the amount of work for even a simple application has just skyrocketed. But is this so bad? In my opinion, this is actually a shift in the right direction, especially with the introduction of Android 4.0 (or Ice Cream Sandwich). The main reason for my opinion is that it forces developers to put more time into the design of their application, resulting in a more polished user experience.

Making an application that scales to the whole range of Android devices is no easy task, but it makes the whole android experience more cohesive among applications. The Fragment, which was introduced with Honeycomb, basically replaces the menu button in Android tablets. Google has also released a backwards compatible API to support all devices with this feature. When a user opens an app for the first time, it needs to be intuitive enough to be useful at that very moment. This doesn't mean all apps need to look the same. They can be completely different, but offer the same basic functions of operation.

With the release of Android 4.0, Google is hoping to clean up some of the fragmentation issues by using the same OS for tablets and phones. The tools are there for developers to use and even though the implementation is becoming more difficult, better apps are the result. And everyone loves better apps.

Welcome!

Welcome! Please sit back, relax, and open up your mind to the world of computer science. Stay tuned for extremely engaging content!