Android Forensics

Posted on April 21st, 2010

sansI have been doing a feasibility study for a client on how to remotely obtain various kinds of phone state for instances where their end-users needs customer support.

In doing so, I came across an interesting site on Android Digital Forensics. There’s some open source code that uses the many ContentProviders to extract information from the phone.

Waiting for Nexus One Device Seeding

Posted on April 20th, 2010

nexusoneIf, like me, you are still waiting for your Nexus One to arrive then you might like to take a look at the discussion on the Android developer forums on ‘Device Seeding Program for Top Android Market Developers’.

For me, delivery was promised to be 2-4 weeks and it’s nearly 7 weeks now. I am not too concerned because it seems that noone outside the US has received the device seeding phones yet.

UPDATE: Received it on 29 April

Copy Protection

Posted on April 19th, 2010

androidmarket1Last week I mentioned that some people, with the latest devices, couldn’t view my apps.

One solution is to switch copy protection ‘off’ in the developer console. The downside of this that it makes your app easier to copy. Whatever you do, don’t set it ‘off’ and then ‘on’ again. As this post shows, this will create serious difficulties for your legitimate users.

Android Market API

Posted on April 16th, 2010

androidmarketapiI have been investigating how to gain programmatic access to the Android Market. There’s no official API but obviously it’s possible because of the many Android app catalog web sites.

There’s a useful (but incomplete) Java implementation called android-market-api as well as an article on how to download market applications without the vending app.

Also, don’t forget, on the phone you can simply reference an application using the following link for the following form:

market://search?q=pname:com.simonjudge.database

(obviously change to point to your app)

Android WebKit Browser Performance

Posted on April 14th, 2010

rightwareBSN are reporting that RightWare have launched a new browser benchmark. The results shown on the BSN site show that Android WebKit performs strongly compared to the iPhone and Symbian…

rightwareresults