Android Defects
It is rightly said that nothing is perfect in this world. Everything has some defect. Even the mobile companies who claim that their products are 100% accurate do have many defects. Likewise Android is known to be the best system in any smartphone but still have many defects. I security audit of the Android kernel has disclosed 88 high risk defects which includes security vulnerabilities, data loss, or quality problems such as system crashes. According to Coverity the defects are memory corruption flaws, memory illegal accesses and resource leaks. What Coverity said about the defects is illustrated below:
- HTC Droid incredible has Android kernel in it and has half the defects that we expect from similar software of the same size.
- 25% of the Android defects discovered include memory corruptions, memory illegal accesses, and resource leaks. These defects are taken so seriously because they cause security vulnerabilities, data loss, or quality problems such as system crashes as discussed earlier
- Coverity said that it has warned HTC of the issues. On the whole, the firm found 359 defects in the Android kernel that is used in the HTC Droid Incredible. The good news is the Android kernel defect density is 0.47 defects per 1000 lines of code. This is better than the industry average on one defect per 1000 lines of code.
- Android is not made by itself. Different companies are making it. It is based on Linux, which has many contributors. Likewise Google and OEMs are supplying specific configurations of Android to support different types of devices.
- That is why Android cannot do accountability of the work that is done under it. It is though not clear that that is making the vision and functions of Android dull and blur. So we can’t rectify the problem easily. The only solution of this problem is that new level of visibility is needed to provide the OEMs that incorporate Android in its software supply chain with a practical and objective measurement of Android software integrity.
- In addition to the factors that are affecting HTC Droid Incredible, the report includes analysis of about 60 million lines of code from 291 of the most used open source projects even including Firefox and Apache. The total number of the defects found is 15,278.
Chou said that we are expecting that this report will highlight this issue and will focus on the point that ultimately for consumers defects are defects where the code comes from.
Let’s see when Android will handle this problem that its customers are facing. If Android will not tackle this problem in time, than it will definitely face a huge decline in its sales. This is because the customer doesn’t want any flaw in its smartphone a she is spending about $200 on it. If he will face any flaw in this smartphone he will sell it and undoubtedly will go for another mobile brand whose reputation and working is better than Android.