With a slew of Android mobile devices streaming into the market, there is a lot of excitement around Google's Android OS and its market. A report by Gartner published in Feb 2011 makes this clear by pointing that in the smartphone OS market, Android grew 888.8 percent in 2010 and moved on to the second position, just next to Symbian which is still the supremo.
However, recently few security issues related to Android raised concerns amongst the consumers. Let us dig into some of these issues and the kind of threats that they have been posing.
Security issues with Android's 'Instant app download' feature
Until recently the only way to access Android Market was to do so directly from an Android device using the Android market app on the device. But recently Google launched the Android Market website that allowed users to choose the apps and automatically download them to their Android devices over the air.
What the user has to do, is to go to the Android Market website (https://market.android.com/) and sign in using his Google credentials and the application immediately retrieves information of Android devices registered in the person's name and also the data about market apps that have been already installed.
Once you choose a particular app that you would want to install on your Android device, the required permissions are displayed by the website which you can either accept or decline. But once you accept installation of the app, on the website, the app is automatically downloaded on mobile device in the background. That is, the user is not asked to grant permission on the device itself.
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