Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 18, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Google has definitively established its Android mobile operating system on the world market. Manufacturer HTC alone has sold well over one million mobile phones based on the open-source operating system developed by Google since April 2008. According to the New York Times, the developers released an updated version of the platform only this week, which is also intended to support the widely used PDF format, among other things. Manufacturers such as Huawei and Samsung also announced the market launch of further Android mobile phones. Following the establishment of Android version 1.5, the development trend is now moving toward greater security. Experts at the Unix Security Conference in Montreal said that the smartphone’s continuing development toward the capabilities of mini PCs requires more comprehensive platform protection.
“Fundamentally, operating systems are always a compromise between openness and security,” says Rich Cannings, Android Security Lead at Google. To date, the Mountain View internet company has relied on running applications in separate sandboxes as Android’s central security mechanism. This was intended to prevent attackers from automatically gaining access to other data if an application were hacked. Software for displaying rich-media content, for example, runs on a separate “media server,” so potential attackers have no access to cookies and passwords stored in the browser. Unlike Apple, however, execution of malicious code is reportedly not stopped, giving attackers greater scope for action, according to a Technology Review report. With the HTC Hero, an Android smartphone also supports Adobe’s Flash technology for the first time, which HTC says underlies more than 80 percent of all videos offered online. “Adobe Flash is one of the central web technologies. We will therefore continue working with Adobe to bring Flash Player version 10 to all our mobile phones,” says John Wang, CMO of HTC.
Mobile-phone manufacturers have recently tended toward different platforms. Alongside Korean electronics group Samsung, which is now adding an Android device to its product portfolio with the Galaxy i7500, market leader Nokia also appears to want to use operating systems other than Symbian. Despite excessively positive reviews of Apple’s App Store from consumers, it is impossible to predict which platforms will ultimately prevail. The smartphone market is developing rapidly, and Google is also not betting on only one horse. In parallel with the development of Android, Chrome OS is intended to create a complete operating system for web applications.
