A while back, I posted this on the BlackBerry/Samsung alliance:
> Fantastic idea. It further legitimizes the concept of an enterprise/consumer product partnership and gives enterprise managers a valid alternative to IBM and Apple. And by valid, I mean, who in their right mind would choose Samsung/BlackBerry over Apple/IBM? Where’s the beef in the Samsung/BlackBerry alliance? Certainly not with the malware riddled Android.
This New York Times article calls out a specific piece of malware, but there appear to be many others:
> A particularly nasty mobile malware campaign targeting Android users has hit between four million and 4.5 million Americans since January of 2013, according to an estimate by Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security company that has been tracking the malware for about two years.
>
> Lookout first encountered the mobile malware, called NotCompatible, two years ago and has since seen increasingly sophisticated versions. Lookout said it believes, based on attempted infections of its user base of 50 million, that the total number of people who have encountered the malware in the United States exceeds four million.
That’s what I mean by malware-riddled.
Android is malware-riddled in the same way Macs are malware-riddled. There are viruses, and sometimes a few of them manage to infect some devices, but if you take the most basic precautions, yours is not going to be one of them.
Remember, there are hundreds of millions of Android phones in usage. In fact, there are probably well over a billion Android phones out there (Android owns about 70% of the worldwide smartphone market). Even if the “four million” number was true, it would still be a small fragment of a percent of the Android users in the US.
And by the way, whenever PC security companies release these kinds of “scary virus infection” numbers about Macs, Mac blogs complain — rightfully so. I seriously doubt that the “four million” number is correct. It’s not based on any hard facts. It’s just an estimation from a mobile security company, which, you know, has kind of a conflict of interest here.
In short, if Android is malware-riddled, so is your Mac, because the exact same things that these articles say about Android are also true about Macs.
“In fact, there are probably well over a billion Android phones out there (Android owns about 70% of the worldwide smartphone market). Even if the “four million” number was true, it would still be a small fragment of a percent of the Android users in the US.”
You began with “worldwide” number then concluded that with that number the affected user will be just a small fragment in the “US”? Wow! With this kind of intelligence no wonder you’re using Android.
Yes, if only the millions of people with cheap commodity Android phones out there knew enough to take “the most basic precautions,” just as they did with their Windows PCs for the past twenty years.
How many carrier-store salespeople do you believe remind new customers to RTFM?
I think the Samsung-Blackberry enterprise alliance is weak from so many different angles, malware being one of the least of their problems.
Blackberry had a well deserved reputation 6 years ago for securing email and device management in the enterprise. (Well, personal email as well I guess). Um, that’s nice but how does that solve a modern enterprise problem?
Take a scenario. Salesforce lets me view up to date sales and customer information in easy to digest reporting formats that I can view anywhere, especially on my phone. Let’s say that you use a competing CRM solution in your organization – the IBM and Apple alliance is trying bring that to iOS in a modern way so you don’t have to face the choice of moving your CRM to Salesforce which would be hellishly expensive. That could be a good solution.
Samsung and Blackberry hopes to secure your email and brick a phone if it gets stolen. Rock on.
I thought the alliance is Samsung’s attempt to copy the Apple IBM partnership? You know… the whole thing about Samsung wanting to copy everything Apple does to the letter. Now even more so.