Lookout’s App Genome Project Identifies iPhone And Android App Security Threats

Lookout , a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, is announcing the results of its App Genome Project, a continued effort to map and study mobile applications to identify security threats in the wild, and determine how apps are using users' personal data. The App Genome Project has already scanned nearly 300,000 free applications, and fully mapped nearly 100,000 applications available in both Android Market and the App Store. Early findings show differences in the sensitive data that is typically accessed by Android and iPhone applications and a proliferation of third party code in applications across both platforms. For example, results found that applications on Android are generally less likely than applications on iPhone to be capable of accessing a person’s contact list or retrieving their location, with 29% of free applications on Android having the ability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone. Of course, this isn't a huge difference in the percentage of apps, but again this is early data.