The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Android Fragmentation: App Development and Security Challenges
The Android market is seriously fragmented. Fragmented because there are so many different vendors that have adopted it for many different devices and form factors. A recent survey by OpenSignal of 600,000 actively used Android devices found that of those 24,093 were unique devices. OpenSignal estimates that more than 1294 companies today are building Android devices. Many of the phones are running older versions of the Android OS.
By some measures, that amount of acceptance and penetration into the market is a mark of success. The wide variety of hardware and price points has been enthusiastically received by consumers that have bought more than one billion Android smartphones and tablets. Windows has proven that fragmentation isn’t necessarily bad and can lead to success. But fragmentation has its issues. Two areas of concern are app development and security.
Developers need to cope with the fact that the software they create might be run on a wide range of hardware options, form factors and Android API versions. This makes it nearly impossible for app developers to test and vet their apps against the whole suite of possibilities. And that can mean potential problems when apps are run on devices that haven’t been fully tested.
But security is another area of concern. One problem is the vast number of combinations of hardware components and software not tested for all combinations can lead to security holes. But an even more challenging problem is when a security problem is found and plugged, rolling out the fix to the many different Android devices is hard. An example is the recent discovery of the Stagefright exploit, a security problem that affects 95 percent of Android devices.
