Mobile Concerns

Google's Android mobile operating system (used to power the HTC G1 smartphone), is vulnerable to a security exploit. The exploit was discovered by ISE (Independent Security Evaluators), an independent consulting firm focused on improving system security. The vulnerability has come about through Google's use of an unpatched version of an open source software library in Android. The impact of the vulnerability is that users of Android's web browser could visit a malicious web page, giving the attacker access to information available to the browser including cookies and passwords. Technical details of the vulnerability will not be made available until a patch for the exploit becomes available.

In an interview with the Mercury News, HTC CEO - Peter Chou - forecasts that HTC will sell more than 600,000 of the Android powered G1 smartphones. He predicts that within 5 years, the percentage of mobile devices that are smartphones will increase from the current 15% to 40-50%.

Time to get your latest smartphone software application out there.

I was looking at Google Trends and thought it would be interesting to see how searches for information on the latest mobile development platforms have changed over the last year. I decided to look at searches for "Android SDK", "iPhone SDK" and "Windows Mobile 6 SDK". Note that the results do not reflect the relative volume of searches between each search term. Instead, they show how the search volume for each term has varied over the twelve months. Out of the three terms used, "iPhone SDK" had the largest search volume by a factor of 10. What I found interesting was that searches for Windows Mobile were pretty much constant throughout the period. Searches related to the iPhone SDK peaked suddenly in March - when Apple announced that the iPhone would soon support Exchange for business e-mail - and again in June 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. Searches related to Android peaked with Google's announcement of the platform in late 2007 and again with the release of the first Android enabled handset in September of this year, but whether this interest will be sustained remains to be seen. My interpretation - interest in iPhone application development has shown major growth over the last year increasing over 6 times, while interest in Windows Mobile Development has remained stable. As for Android, there are a lot of people watching what is going on here, but I'd question how many hardcore developers this platform really has.