Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This is the app roundup. The game roundup from this week can be found here and the tablet app roundup here.
Today's roundup is sponsored by Handy Apps' EasyMoney. EasyMoney is a popular personal finance manager for Android, which has already been downloaded over 500,000 times.
One of the biggest restrictions that we face as Android users is "device incompatibility" issues in the Market, even though the app in question may work perfectly on our device. For example, according to the Android Market, Plants Vs. Zombies is "incompatible" with my Galaxy Tab 10.1; however, when it was initially released to the Amazon Appstore (and before Popcap was bought by EA), I always played it on the Tab. Case in point: it isn't "incompatible" with the Tab 10.1, EA just chose to list it as such (no surprise there).
This type of thing happens far too often, be it due to device restrictions or regional discrepancies.
I'll admit it, I'm anal about CPU and RAM usage. I'm the kind of person that goes into MSConfig every 6 months to scrape useless startup processes like barnacles off the hull of a ship to keep boot times down and squeeze every last possible increment of free RAM and CPU that I can (insert "Then you should use Linux" joke here) out of my system. If you're like me, then you probably avoid heavy, suite-ized security solutions like the bubonic plague crossed with bird flu. There's nothing worse than turning on a new Windows laptop and discovering Norton is installed.
Last week, a "report" by InFlexWeTrust showed a screencap of a popup that invited users to download a "featured" app - Instagram for Android.
With all the crapware pushing AirPush ads to your notification bar that we've seen last week (including the fake Pinterest, Temple Run, and - drumroll - Instagram) and all the clues regarding this so obviously fake Instagram app, one would have thought a bit of caution by the blogosphere would have been a good idea. Unfortunately, the Instagram hype is so strong that plenty of blogs ran with "Instagram was leaked" and "Instagram is almost here" stories.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This is the app roundup. The game roundup from this week can be found here and the tablet app roundup here.
Tasks N Todos is a TODO manager from Handy Apps, the developer of such well received apps as Easy Money and Tip N Split Tip Calculator.
As Android has grown from a small hobbyists OS to the mainstream-conquering behemoth it is today, so has the amount of malware directed towards it. A large chunk of the problem comes from malicious apps that make it into the Android Market - often times, duplicates of popular apps with a few strings of code thrown in that allow the app to transmit personal information or hijack the device.
Makers of anti-virus apps claim that there's more malware in the market than ever, painting the picture of a wild west-esque place that's ever-more attractive to the scum of the app universe.
We've all heard the debates (or been involved in them) about Android malware. Some say it doesn't really exist and is only used as a "scare tactic." Others insist that it's a threat and is becoming more prominent.
Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, Lookout Labs would have us believe that it finds thousands of threats everyday. In order to help visualize this claim, Lookout released a new app to the Market called Mobile Threat Tracker that shows, in almost real-time, detected infections on Lookout-protected devices across the globe.
Each infection is dramatically flown into the screen and represented by a stream of glowing light that becomes a glowing dot of malware/spyware evil on its respective part of the globe.
Antivirus apps are big business on Android. Just run a search on our site and you can see there are tons of big-name apps for our beloved OS that help protect users from malware, track lost devices, and manage privacy (among other things). Millions have downloaded such apps, and sometimes paid fairly large sums (in relation to other apps, anyway) for the protection they offer.
Simply put, then, do you use antivirus on any of your Android devices?
There's no shortage of antivirus, antimalware, or other forms of anti-bad stuff apps in the Market. In fact, we've look taken at a ton of them. If none of those could handle your list of wants from a mobile security app, have a look a Comodo Mobile Security - it brings a few useful features all together into a single app.
Like you would expect from Comodo, it's first and foremost an antivirus/antimalware. It also includes a subset of other useful tools, like process manager (read: task manager), privacy protection that allows you to keep certain info (like specific contacts, SMS, etc.) confidential, and an SMS/Call blocking tool that filters out unwanted calls and text with a standard black/white list.
We've seen our fair share of Android malware hit the scene, but the guys over at Kaspersky Labs have stumbled upon something rather alarming: the first IRC bot for Android. For those unaware, an IRC bot is a tool that provides automated function inside of an IRC channel. While very useful in many scenarios, IRC bots are also often used for malicious intent, such as the case at hand. It's worth noting here that, with the way this attack works, remote commands could be sent via any medium - SMS, webserver, etc. The attacker has just chosen IRC as the platform for this exploit.
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