A lot of people, privately and especially in the media, love to bitch and complain to no end about Apple's so-called draconian App Store Policies, but what they don't want you to know about is how this strict enforcement policy helps to protect its users from a lot of the crap that others are forced to put up with on other devices.
Take for example the fact that it is now believed that up to 20 whopping percent of all Android apps may now be completely exposing their users to some vary serious privacy issues, and, according to this report by PCWorld, it can get even worse than that, as they state:
"Besides the 20 percent of applications that let third parties access private or sensitive information, 5 percent of applications have the ability to place a call to any number, and 2 percent of applications can send an SMS to an unknown premium number, in both cases without user involvement."
Well, as bad as the above may sound, the really bad news, doesn't stop here either. Being the so-called open system that it is, well it is now totally possible for one of the worst scourges from the PC era to now also afflict open source devices, namely that of ...... bloatware, or as some might prefer to call it, good-old-fashion crapware!
Since open source is, well open sourced, and free for anybody to do pretty much any dang tooting thing that they want, including offering poor quality apps which may also include dangerous spyware, and now bloat ware as well, I guess that anything is possible. This is in stark contrast to Apple's method where it strictly monitors and blocks out such crap.
Bloatware, as you already know, is not only inconvenient and irritating, but at the same time, it can readily eat up your system's resources, be its memory, cpu or what have you, thus making your overall device run buggy, slower and a lot more cumbersome in which to use..... and yet all of this without your expressed desire or permission!
Of course, as Gizmodo pointed out recently, not all Android phones necessarily come with all of this crapware pre-installed, but being the so-called open platform that it is, it still means that any phone supplier can easily add it, at anytime, if they so disire. Not all do, of course, but a large number of companies are more than happy to install this junk regardless of whether your happy about it or not. After all, it may bug up your system, but whether you like it or not it's still a very lucrative source of advertising revenue for them, so you can probably expect a lot more of this crap in the near and long term future. And the real bummer is..... you can't even delete most of it! As it has been said: "You can't remove it because Android is open."
Well, you can say all you want about Apple's App Store rejection polices, but if it helps to deliver me some peace-of-mind, top-notch security, less hassle and a cleaner, faster and smoother running device than I'll take it anyday! However, if you don't mind an opens source platform where anyone can pretty much do anything they please, any old time they please, and one that potentially includes them pre-installing as much or as little bloatware as they wish, and which can potentially compromise your system's functionality, speed and, most important of all..... your security, well, then forget about the true cost of the iPhone, because there's always Android.
So, until next Monday or Tuesday, that's my 2 cents 4 today, Friday, July 23, 2010
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