BARCELONA: Ahead of the launch of the Nokia X, the Finnish smartphone manufacturer claimed that nine percent of the Android apps it tested contained malware. This highlighted the growing number of threats on the Android platform.
During an interview with The INQUIRER at MWC, VP of developer relations at Nokia, Amit Patel, revealed around 9,000 of the apps tested by them during Nokia's two-stage testing process contained some sort of virus or malware while it was put through a scanner. Patel said, "Before we launched the Nokia X, we tested apps to see how compatible they were, and we found that nine percent of the 100,000 apps we tested, from multiple Android app stores, had viruses."
Nokia trying to tempt users over to its own ecosystem owing to the security issues with Android apps. However, several studies have warned of the huge number of malicious Android apps out there, and they back Patel’s statement too.
As per reports on the Inquirer, Patel explained that Nokia would carefully pick apps for its Android-based Nokia ecosystem. He also added that things would be done differently as compared to the present scenario at Google Play.
"There are two tools we have, the intake system and the marketing system," he said. "On the intake system, we are doing things a bit differently than on Google Play. We're doing pre-moderation, which means we'll first check that an app is legal and doesn't infringe any copyrights, and then we do quality assessment. When it comes to the merchandising tool, we take into account how many downloads an application has had, and consider consumer feedback. We have manual merchandising on a global level; we want to make sure the right apps are available on the Nokia X platform."
"There're a few things we do to make sure the content going in is of a reasonable quality," Patel added, pointing out to the number of fake apps available in Google Play.
Patel said to the Inquirer that presently, there are thousands of apps that already available for the Nokia X platform, and he couldn't provide an exact number.
"We've got apps in our Nokia store, and we've also got partner stores, which because of the ease of compatibility, just work on the Nokia X.”
