iPad and iPhone users unlikely to see Android wallpaper app breach

One of the fundamental differences between the iPhone and Android platforms is that while Apple manually tests and approves every third party iPhone app before it becomes available to users (more than 95% of submitted apps are ultimately approved), the Android “app store” is more like the wild west. And while breaches can and do happen on the Apple side of the fence (on the Fourth of July, a rogue individual posing as an iPhone app developer hacked the App Store to briefly push his own phony eBooks up the App Store sales charts), millions of Android users have now been hit by what reads like a Kindergarten-level hack: a simple wallpaper app available in the Android app store was downloaded by millions before anyone caught on to the fact that the app was rigged to steal users’ data and send it wirelessly back to the unscrupulous app developer.

There’s no way to know for sure that Apple, with its stringent testing and approval process for third party apps for its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch platforms, would have caught such an app before it went live – but it’s doubtful that it would have gotten past Apple’s testers. While geek-leaning Android users brag about the “open” nature of their platform (in other words, they find it to be more recreationally hackable), the flipside of that “openness” is that malware thinly veiled as a harmless wallpaper app is far more likely to be a problem for Android users than iPhone users. While Apple has approved about a quarter million free and paid third-party apps for the iPhone and iPad, none of them have ever been a free wallpaper app that steals users’ data.

Source: Venturebeat, relayed by @lvdjgarcia via Daring Fireball’s @gruber