Android Shows the Sign of Decline

Without any doubt, Android is the most popular smartphone operating system nowadays, which currently has about 48% of the smartphone market share, leading iOS and RIM. As of June 2011 Google said that 550,000 new Android devices were being activated every day —up from 400,000 per day two months earlier in May 2011 -and more than 100 million devices have been activated.

As the best-selling smartphone platform, Android consists of a mobile operating system based on the Linux kernel, with middleware, libraries and APIs written in C and application software running on anapplication framework which includes Java-compatible libraries based on Apache Harmony. The OS uses the Dalvik virtual machine with just-in-time compilation to run compiled Java code. Android has a large community of developers writing applications (“apps”) that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently more than 250,000 apps available for Android.

As we all know, Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software license. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android.

It seems that the sales figure and marketshare percentage show us a very bright future of Android, it could even totally defeat iOS become the king of smartphone OS forever. But in my opinion, the current achievement is just illusion, the battle is not over yet, and Android is apparently going down and showing the sign of decline.

As an Android user, I know it’s sad, but true. The operating system is well-know as open and free, and we are all proud of it. However, this policy is just like a time bomb, it might attract millions of users in very beginning, but sooner or later those users will finally realize how terrible open and free is. First of all, for developers, free-to-use means they cannot get a single cent from the apps they developed, so they put advertisement and online promotion into the apps instead, which will definitely piss the users off. The developers got no choice, because this is the only way to get the payoff, and this is also the reason why apps on Android is always worse than the same one on iOS. As a matter of fact, a quite numbers of developers have transferred to iOS platform, they’ve seen Androd as a secondary platform, therefore the quality of Android apps are getting more and more terrible.

Oh, I almost forget there actually are paid apps on Android market, but according to the statistics, just a few users would like to play, yes, who like to pay if they have gotten use to get free. But one thing I have to admit is, the paid apps have much higher quality than the free ones.

As ‘free’ lower the quality of apps, ‘open’ just put users’ safety and privacy in danger. As of August 2011, the malwares on android plaform has incresed 400% than last years. In August 2010, an SMS Trojan called Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a infected a number of mobile devices, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab. Disguised as a harmless media player application, the trojan, once installed sends out SMS text messages without the user’s knowledge or consent. According to Denis Maslennikov, Senior Malware Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an exact number of devices infected is not available at present, but the outbreak is currently regional. For now, only Russian Android users can actually lose money after installing the Trojan, but anyone can be infected. Android users were advised not to use the Android web browser until Google issues a security patch. The Android Security Team responded and developed a fix on February 5 2011 and patched Open Source Android two days later.

In March 2011, Google pulled 58 malicious apps from the Android Market, but not before the 58 apps were downloaded to around 260,000 devices. These apps were malicious applications in the Android Market which contained trojans hidden in pirated versions of legitimate apps. The malware (called DroidDream) exploited a bug which was present in versions of Android older than 2.2.2. Android device manufacturers and carriers work in tandem to distribute Android based updates and had not uniformly issued patches to their customers for the DroidDream exploit, leaving users vulnerable. Google said the exploit allowed the apps to gather device specific information, as well as personal information. The exploit also allowed the apps to download additional code that could be run on the device. Within days, Google remotely wiped the apps from infected users and rolled out an update that would negate the exploits that allowed the apps to view information. They also announced that they would be resolving the issue to ensure that events like this did not occur again. Security firms such as AVG Technologies and Symantec have released “antivirus” software for Android devices. In August 2011, Security firm Lookout estimated that between half a million to one million Android users have been affected by malicious software in the first half of 2011. Lookout also reported that there was an increase of applications infected with malware, from 80 to 400 in the first six months of 2011.

Further more, Android is currently struggling with the patents issue, but that was not the biggest one that the open operating system has, Google should really think about the step next, open and free or close and paid, no matter what it could be, the user experience should always be the first priority.