Google Solution for Bad Android Applications May be in the Stars

Google is looking to alleviate mobile operators fears of malicious and buggy Android applications being created by the global developer community at large via a proposed star rating system.

Rich Miner, group manager of Google’s Android mobile technology, spoke at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit last week about how the mobile carriers are concerned most about Android users installing applications that could harm their network, the users data, or just be buggy in general.

Software for cell phones have for the most part been supplied directly through the mobile service provider, but Google is looking to make Android freely available to developers under the Apache open-source license and establish a common mobile software platform allowing applications to be created by anyone.

Tim Bray, Sun’s web technologies director, stated at OSCON this week, “The only mobile platform that’s widely used to access the Net is the iPhone and it’s a totally controlled ecosystem where you’re only allowed to write the programs Apple says you’re allowed to write.  I like the idea of Android. I’ve been really disappointed in the progress of the project.”

The fear the mobile carriers have of Android’s application development free-for-all is the inevitability of hacks, spam, and poor coding resulting in a combination of network outages, security issues, and chronic calls / emails to their customer support due to these unregulated programs.

Miner states that Google is, “not going to have an app-signing hurdle” as opposed to what Apple is doing with the iPhone application development.

The solution seems to point to a hybrid YouTube Facebook approach utilizing a star rating system, copyright infringement removal, plus a verification program.

This combination would seem to bury the malicious or crap applications from propagating to the worst case scenarios the carriers envision.

Rich Miner claims he is “getting there” as far as an agreement with the mobile carriers to let their subscribers download any Android application, but more importantly affirmed that Android gPhones are on schedule to be released by the end of 2008.