Android: fragmentation and security - an extraordinary coincidence

We've been reading for years that Android is suffering dreadfully from fragmentation. Barely 2% of phones out there run the latest version of the operating system, while a good 40% and more are more than two major versions old. The problem is that the OS is installed (mostly) by the manufacturers, who then sit back and do nothing, losing interest because they just want to sell new phones, not support old ones, while the telcos may push out a couple of minor revisions, if you are lucky, and then they lost interest too, because they want to sell you a new phone with a new plan.

At the same time, Google faces challenges in maintaining control over the Android platform itself, as other players (Amazon, Alibaba, maybe soon Samsung) are choosing to fork the OS and mould it to their own plans, replacing links to Google's online services with their own.

Now, completely coincidentally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the lack of updates, on the basis that older versions of the operating system have known bugs that are exploitable to gain remote control over consumers' phones; thus the telcos are lacking in their duty of care to the consumer. This, I have to say immediately, is a Really Big Deal, and I guarantee that the telcos will sit up and take notice. Not only do they risk FTC investigations into their business practices, and audits of their security, they have just been put on notice that they may soon be facing class action suits from aggrieved consumers, or at least by the ACLU and others on their behalf. In effect, their operations have just become materially more risky, and that will have to be noted in their statutory filings with the SEC... the consequences just go on, and they are all unpleasant.

My guess is that as the telcos wake up to the magnitude of their exposure here, they will rush todo two things. First, they will absolutely require from the handset manufacturers that they ship the latest version of the OS on new phones. Second, they will address the problem of updates. Here, the most desirable solution would be to make it somebody else's problem: try to enforce a requirement to keep the OS up-to-date on the handset suppliers. This may or may not stick, and certainly is likely to be limited in scope, perhaps to the consumer's contract term (where the phone sold via a contract) - arguably, if the consumer supplies their own phone, updating it is the consumer's problem. If it doesn't stick however, the telcos will have to manage the updates themselves, and the consequence of that will be a rush, nay a stampede, to make sure that the handsets are easily updateable from Google's stock updates. In other words, it will be the kiss of death for supplier's custom skinning of the OS.

The effect on forked versions such as Amazon's Kindle will arguably be less, since those firms are currently bearing the support burden themselves anyway, but at least those suppliers will be on notice that their versions of Android will need to be as secure as Google's. Otherwise they may be exposed to legal risk.

At a single stroke, the ACLU has gone a long way to solving the problems that Google is experiencing from zombie versions, excessive manufacturer skinning and shell replacements, and even, to a degree, forking. What an amazing coincidence!

The Greek seamens' strike

The sheer amount of damage that the Greeks seem to be able and willing to do to themselves continues to stagger me. The latest is a 24-hour strike amongst seamen protesting anti-austerity measures. This is bound to act as a wake-up call to anybody who is considering buying property on a Greek island (if indeed there are any such people left), and should the exercise be repeated for a more extended period, life on Greek islands — a vital part of their tourist industry — will come to a shuddering halt. Remember, most people in Europe have just three days' food in their cupboards.

The point of Facebook Home

I'm thinking that the real point of Facebook Home — the app that replaces the Android shell with a Facebook-specific one, including rolling photos from your Facebook friends' picture albums on its lock screen — is not just to keep people engaging with Facebook, but to up their Facebook time figures even when they are not interacting with it.

After all, if Facebook pages and web-app endpoints are constantly being queried in the background, even when people are phoning, texting or playing games, then Zuckerberg's viewing figures are going to look absolutely wonderful.

Investing - reading the boards

Today is a day for trawling through news, looking at risers and fallers, and reading the boards (the forums) at places like iii, in the hope of throwing up new leads. The latter activity is proving rather depressing: so many boards where a long, gentle decline in the share price is accompanied by posts saying things like "holding for the moment - surely this can't go on!", followed by a single, agonised post saying "What just happened?", as the unfortunate investors are relieved of 99% of their invested capital on one unforgiving day.

So I'm going to think a little longer about Blinkx. Even if the results are going to be as good as expected, the recent, rumour-driven rise in the share price (supposedly google are looking at them, ho-hum) has probably taken most of the value out of that already. And long term, the share price does seem to still be on its declining trajectory.

The same with AZ Electronic Materials. Yes, the recent drop was probably overdone, but the smart money picked it up on Tuesday at about 240p. That said, their conference call was very reassuring: the slowdown in colloidal silicon sales was caused mostly by two of their customers learning how to squirt less of the stuff over their chip wafers while polishing them, and less by competition, and those two customers were only coming down from using *more* than everybody else, so that practice is not going to spread; opto-electronics was good, and they have firm promises of restocking from their customers in the IC business in the second half. That sounds like a potential purchase, but I might wait a few days and think about it a bit more.

Meanwhile, the Real Portfolio is powering ahead. Genel (which I bought on March 5th as a place-holder while I was waiting for GKP to stop falling and clear up its court case) has had a stream of good news since then and has risen 14%. Cairn is up nicely, even Imagination is up again after its recent decline. Finally, Wolfson, the perpetual puppy that I fall for time and again, only to be disappointed, has at last come good in a big way by being appointed a primary partner for Samsung, supplying audio hubs to their Galaxy range. That's good not just for the business itself, which has led to a nice 8% bounce in the share price, but because it will doubtless encourage other phone and tablet manufacturers to look at using them — Samsung being very much the firm to copy nowadays.

Worldwide PC sales tumble

Says a new BBC article, quoting an IDC report [PC sales fell 14% globally in the first three months 2013, the biggest fall ever].

This is further evidence for my belief that 2013 will mark the first of the "crisis years" for Microsoft, when its income will fall substantially relative to Google and Apple, with Intel also starting to feel the chill.