Contract-free smartphones for 150 euros (216 dollars)
Samsung Galaxy Gio packagingI am amazed by how quickly smartphone prices have come down. The price drop is likely driven by the fast growth of the open-source Android platform, which takes the burden off manufacturers to build their own obscure smartphone OS from scratch.

A few weeks ago, I finally caved in and bought my first smartphone. I went with the Samsung Galaxy Gio, which available from stores for 150 euros if you shop around. It comes with a 800 Mhz processor and surprisingly, I can play most Angry Birds on it without suffering from severe battery drainage and slowed down gameplay.

Mobile apps are harvesting your location and phone ID
In December 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported that some mobile apps on both iOS and Android are sending info such as your phone ID, location, age and gender to their servers and those of certain ad networks. Pandora was among a list of apps that got a public spanking for this behavior. Innocent-looking games like Paper Toss send the user’s phone ID to at least five ad networks for no good reason. This sneaky practice is not necessary for the functioning of the app, only helps ad networks target users individually and doesn’t even ask for permission.

Taking a look at some Android-specific privacy problems, it came to my attention that many popular applications request access to owner’s location data, including rough netwerk-based location data and exact GPS coordinates.

Last.fm requesting location dataSkype requesting location dataFacebook requesting location dataShazam requesting location dataSoundHound requesting location data

These are just some of the popular apps that want access to the user’s location data for varying reasons. In most cases, the app contains some location-based features that need the user’s location to operate. However, due to the way the Android Market is built up, it is not possible to use an app without its location-based features. The app can either be installed with all listed permissions or not at all.

You can see how this design decision greatly reduces the flexibility of Android’s app platform. If a user doesn’t want Facebook to know their location, they can’t use Facebook at all or they will have to resort to using m.facebook.com to see what people are posting. Ah, first world problems…

iOS takes a more clever approach here, letting its users install apps without giving location access upfront. Instead, the application will ask for access when it actually needs it and the user can permanently turn off Location Services for a given app. By doing this, users can keep using Google Maps while preventing nosy apps from phoning home to report their exact location.

Location Services on iOS devicesiOS app asking for access to Location Services

I believe that this is a better way to manage location permissions. By implementing this, Android would show itself to be more privacy-aware. While this introduces the light burden of the user having to grant location permissions separately in the app, it is more transparent to users and will improve people’s trust in Android apps and ultimately the Android Market.