The Android situation

They (as in the great guys and girls who do android stuff around here) finally let me look at some numbers. The situation, it seems, is a bit like with motorcycle clubs in the US: you have the AMA and lots of little local clubs just rolling along, minding their own business, then you have the one-percenters, the outlaws who kinda ruin it for everyone else and are responsible for the bad-boy image of motorcyclists in general.

Only, if the Sturgis rally were something like the Android market, there wouldn’t be throngs of menacing-looking folk milling around on menacing-looking steeds of steel. Sure, you’d still have some of those, but they’d be drowned in a mass of pink-pony-themed, chrome-lined Vespas and impeccably clean beemers ridden by corporate account manager types in Gucci leathers.

That’s because the Android market is, well, surprisingly clean, at least so far. You see, out of the total number of individual instances of apps scanned by Bitdefender in July, only a little bit over 0.009% were found to be malicious.

Make of it what you will, for now, because we don’t have quite enough data to discern trends so far so we won’t speculate. Personally, I think it’s a good thing, so enjoy it while it lasts.