I’m a bit of a CNBC junkie; I stream it all day (so if you want to spear-phish me, send an email about my subscription to pro.cnbc.com expiring, harhar).
While drinking coffee this morning and going through my news feeds, the story about malicious Android applications floated to the top (via finance.yahoo.com):
http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/android-malware-apps/
So who is to blame? Google for not really vetting things before they go to the marketplace? Users for being tricked? Certainly more than one party can share blame, but based on the soundbytes from financial news, Google has been doing exactly what Wall Street wants them to do: MORE APPS!
The yardstick to measure success in the mobile marketplace is the number of handsets/devices AND number of applications. I’m sure Google is aware of that, because nearly every bit of financial news banter is about whether or not Android can gain share from Apple. RIM is acutely aware of this, too. If you see any of their latest ad campaigns (on financial TV) it’s about their Super Apps. What RIM is trying to do is tell the world, “nevermind the fact we dont have a bajillion apps, we have quality apps!”
@Google – I know you know you have a problem here. And I know that you know there isn’t much you can do about it. It’s a difficult dance: you need fast, wide-spread adoption to keep the financial analysts happy. But, if you continue down this reckless path, consumers will lose confidence in your platform and go to iOS because it feels safer. (BTW Google, YOUR Gmail app, written by you, keeps crashing on my phone…nasty error. When consumers see com.android, it hits the same nerve as the blue screen of death.)
The security industry can learn a lot by watching financial news! I’m curious to know what our blog readers think. Will we see a change from Google? How many news stories like this will it take? Maybe Google will stay out of it and let the anti-virus vendors get in to slow down our devices?
Cheers!
-Aaron Higbee
p.s. This email came in while this post was in draft:
