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July 5, 2010

Google can now say that its Android mobile operating system now has the biggest slice of mobile developer's mindshare, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, and no matter what Steve Ballmer is saying these days.

But mobile developers still have bills to pay and still have to put food on their tables.

In the mobile apps world, Apple and Google operate their own app stores that offer developers critical consumer mass. Microsoft is almost absent from that segment, and many wireless industry observers don't expect that to change anytime soon either.

Of all the open-source mobile platforms — Android, Symbian and a few others — Android is the clear winner. iPhone is surely a great winner as well, but it isn't open source. It garners the most raw interest, as measured by Google Trends data. It also ships the most relevant new smartphone handsets: 65,000 each day of the week!

The result? Well, mobile developers all over the world have written more than 80,000 apps for Android alone, and that number is growing rapidly.

While Apple currently claims nearly triple Android's app population for the iPhone OS (iOS), there are at least two reasons to believe that developers will fall out with Apple over time to embrace Android.

First, Apple's iPhone pricing strategy may not work on the global stage, a point made by Dan Steinbock at Harvard Business Review. The iPhone first came to India with a bang in 2008, but high prices - $665 for 8 GB, $775 for 16 GB - buried the product.

Overall, most buyers felt many of the key features were already available in mobile devices that cost only a fraction of that amount. But for phones that may cost less than $175 to build, both Apple and Airtel stuck to the $700 price for the phone in India, vs. $199 with a two-year AT&T contract in the U.S.

After India, the iPhone flopped in China, where it arrived with a price tag of a stunning $1,000 without a contract. By the end of last year, some 100,000 iPhones had been sold in China in a marketplace of 724 million mobile users.

Given the volume in these two markets alone, and their significance going forward, there's reason to believe that Android will find a heartier consumer welcome than iPhone OS. Developers, anxious to sell their apps into these markets, should follow.

The second reason to believe that Android will win in the long run is that it has history on its side. Whatever one may think of Microsoft, one of the reasons it beat out its personal computer competitors is that it offered a more open alternative and at a lower overall cost. Android appeals to developers for the same reasons.

This isn't to suggest that Google will find it easy to win over mobile apps developers, however. As prominent developer Jon Lech Johansen opines, Google needs to do a number of things to improve its Android Market experience so as to better serve consumers and, by extension, app developers.

Android needs a touch of the Jobsian strongman, someone to cut out the clutter of Android apps and enforce QA. Recent survey data from Appcelerator confirms this, with about 54 percent of the 2,733 developers surveyed betting on Android over the long term, even as they code for Apple in the short term.

It's worth noting that Appcelerator provides a layer of translation software that Steve Jobs appeared to ban in the iPhone OS 4 release but that is now allowed, at least for now and at Apple's discretion...

So far, Appcelerator polled more than 2,000 mobile apps developers on various smartphone trends.

Wireless Industry News predicts that Andoid will continue to be development platform of choice for the balance of this year and for all of 2011.

Last week, Google has confirmed that it remotely removed two free apps from several hundred Android smartphones simply because the apps greatly misrepresented their purpose and in turn violated Google's Android Terms of Use.

This is reportedly the first time Google has used the Remote Application Removal Feature that allows it to delete specific mobile applications for ToS violations or security reasons that have been installed through Android Market Place.

"An attacker who develops legitimate-looking apps and distributes them on the Android Market could gather a large install base and if there was a vulnerability within the Android operating system or Linux upon which Android is based. The attacker can then phone home to see if there is an exploit to download and push it out to all the Android phones he controls and take complete control of the phone via the Linux kernel," said John Oberheide, who works at a new mobile security firm called Scio Security.

The Android apps that were removed consisted of software designed to test the feasibility of distributing a program that could later be used to take control of the device in an attack, according to Oberheide, the developer who wrote and distributed the mobile apps in the first place.

The first one, dubbed RootStrap, executed code that merely printed a message on the phone that says "Hello World," while the second app did the exact same stunt but was disguised as a preview of the "Twilight Saga: Eclipse" movie, said Oberheide.

There were about fifty downloads of the RootStrap app and roughly about 304 of the Twilight app, though some people later uninstalled them, he said.

Under the Android Market Content Policy for Mobile Developers, "programmers should not upload or otherwise make available mobile apps that offer wrongful or misleading information about an application's real purpose."

Oberheide has also developed a program that could be used to bootstrap a rootkit, effectively allowing someone to remotely take control of a phone by having an app already installed on it phone home to fetch code that could exploit a vulnerability on the Android phone, he said.

He removed the apps voluntarily from the Android Market after being asked to by Google, Oberheide said.

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Source: Google.