Hot Android News For The First Monday Of October!
With the smartphone wars escalating, no self-respecting tech company should allow their product to be left standing in the wake of another company’s progress. Thus, we see the smartphone wars getting bitter by the day.
Today’s update is about two things:
The iPhone 5 will be released on October 4. Thus, the rabid Apple fanatics will be camping out on the Apple Stores by midnight of October 4, US Time. That means around noon our time for the East Coast residents, or around late afternoon for us, if we’re talking about the West Coast. Either way, the Apple universe is already waiting with bated breath.
That being said, we came across a piece of news putting the iPhone/iOS in a good light, while disparaging the Android’s flaws.
In a nutshell, the post is saying that the Android’s stats are bloated, and the numbers are not really significant; they don’t necessarily mean that the Android is ahead of the iOS. They are saying that the 550,000 activations a day for the Android do not necessarily mean more market share, as other activations could also mean that users have either upgraded or rooted their OS, among other things.
Here’s what we can say about this note: We’re betting that less than 2% of that 550,000 are actually power users and would dare to root their Androids. At that generous rate, it means only 11,000 people dare to root their devices in a day. And we are being generous at that. Most likely, only 1% of that 550,000 are actually daring – or knowledgeable enough to root or upgrade their devices. And no sane user would update his device every day for the whole week. A user may update or upgrade once after buying the device. With the speed (or slowness) of the release of the next versions of the Android, it’s highly unlikely that a user will be upgrading his device every month. Every 6 months, if his hardware can handle it, probably. But every month? Every week? Every day?! Not impossible, but very improbable.
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There’s another sad news for Android users, especially for the HTC owners: HTC recently pushed out a system app that collected data fromtheir Android users’ handsets. The purpose of the app is not clear to the users, but it gathers data, ostensibly for HTC’s benefit. What makes the security breach worse is that it exposes this data to basically any other app that needs to collect data. This means almost ALL the free apps available on the Android Market. Free apps need to collect some user data because of the ads they will be pushing on the user. However, these apps are generally secure if the HTC app is not in the system, because their access is limited only to what they need and what are declared safe and allowable by the Android Market’s standards. With the HTC app in place, however, they will gain access to data they previously have no access to.
So what is a security-conscious user to do? First is to check your system for “HtcLoggers.apk” via the Settings/Applications/Manage Applications/Running menu. If you do, uninstall all free apps, especially those with permissions to collect data. (We’re sad to see your free games go.) Then either use the premium, no-ads applications for now, or put up with a Spartan (sort of bare) Android for now.
And to keep abreast with the updates, call HTC support and ask them about when they plan to remove the app and if it’s possible to downgrade to the HTC Android version without the HTC app that contains the HtcLoggers.apk package.
Alternatively, you can sell your HTC and get a Samsung or a Cherry Mobile instead.
These are two of the hottest news for the Android today. Come back for more tomorrow!
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Photo Credits: INeedBob
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