Controls have to be put on the development of applications for handsets to avoid the type of security problems that have plagued PCs. This was among the conclusions reached by panellists at the MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Franciso.
Carriers and developers both seem willing to accept that some level of application control and that certification is inevitable if the mobile platform is to suffer fewer of the malware problems that have haunted PCs. However, there was less agreement however about who should wield the control.
Symbian executive director Lee Williams noted: “If you are totally open, we’ll have the same problems for mobile phones as we have for the PC.”
Williams added: “You’ll have to run antivirus and security software and your data will be at risk. When you think about, it a mobile phone probably has more personal information on it than a computer.”
He said that if malware did take firm hold in the mobile market, the results could be disastrous. If people could not trust their mobiles, consumer confidence would collapse, particularly in lucrative data services.
Sprint’s Russ McGuire added: “The other aspect is regulatory requirements. There are things we are forced to protect by government regulations. There are constraints [on] how we as an industry open that up.”
McGuire said carriers had to work with developers for safety in applications, pointing out that Sprint would shortly be holding its ninth annual developer conference when some carriers had yet to hold their first.
Tom Conrad, chief technical officer for Pandora, said that, from an application developer standpoint, developers had shown that they were happy to cede a level of control.
“Some developers would have said Apple’s App store was doomed to failure because of certification process,” he said. “What we’ve seen is developers are happy to trade control for access to a very, very large market. Controls points aren’t all bad.”
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