Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers

I'm sure it could get past the App Store approval but launching the app is going to prompt the user to allow location information to be sent. Depending on the application this would raise some red flags for the user. Most importantly there's no downside to not allowing location so the user isn't punished for saying no in the same way that an Android app simply won't install if you don't accept the laundry list of permissions it requests.

An application in the Apple app store purported to be a flashlight app but was actually a tethering application: There was no secret binary obfuscation or amazing hacking, it just simply said "I am A" while actually being B. That should give insight into the depth of analysis that occurs with Apple's curation: they are concerned about functionality overlap and other high level things, and there are zero guarantees that the application does what it says it does.

On Android there are very granular permissions, and an application cannot do anything -- like getting your coarse or fine position -- that it wasn't specifically granted rights to, however like the article mentions it's hardly difficult to social engineer an explanation for why the right should exist. And of course, sometimes benign apps do need far reaching rights in a way that causes user security fatigue. Barcode Scanner, for instance, scans barcodes and looks up products, yet on install it demands -- all or nothing -- that it have access to your contacts. That concerned me greatly, but I later learned that it can also generate barcodes for your contacts.

Android security can be improved. For instance apps should have optional right requests. I would say no to contacts on Barcode Scanner, for instance, and it should live without that right, just as I would say "no" to a game where I don't use geolocation matching for if it wants positional data. There should also be the option for an "on use" right setting, where, for instance, whenever it asks for my fine position I have to individually grant that right, which is the one thing that iOS does right.

This is ultimately simply an installer issue -- the reality is that apps already can probe to see if a given right is available, and can enable/disable functionality based upon it. All that is needed is for the installer to provide the boolean.

Overall, though, I feel far more secure with the granular permissions model of Android than with the all-or-nothing (aside from fine position) iOS model.

>Also addressing the point by ergo98

The reply button is available for your convenience.

>a single anecdote does not a convincing argument make

It isn't an anecdote.

People submit binaries to Apple, and they either do static and dynamic code analysis, or they don't. I have never heard about them rejecting an application based upon such analysis, and in this case we know that it was an incredible deviation from the stated purpose.

But let's assume they do start doing such analysis -- because they have such a limited runtime security check, to circumvent it is trivial obfuscation. Of course developers needn't even bother with that.

The reality is that we have no frigging clue what apps in the App Store are doing -- Android is an open enough, transparent enough ecosystem that it is an easy, obvious target for researchers.

No one, to my knowledge, is doing similar analysis of the iOS market.