Mobile Usage Report Highlights Trends and Shifts in Mobile Device Use

Mobile analytics firm Flurry has issued a report analyzing time spent on mobile devices by the average US consumer between January and March of 2014. This is the second such report that Flurry issues, allowing for an interesting comparison year to year showing, among other things, that mobile devices are changing the way the web is consumed.

Secure Coding for the Android Platform

CERT Secure Coding team, part of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, have recently released secure coding guidelines specific to Java’s application in the Android platform. InfoQ interviews Lori Flynn, one of the researchers who authored them.

Android 4.1.1 Vulnerable to Reverse Heartbleed

Google announced last week that Android 4.1.1 is susceptible to the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug. While Android 4.1.1 is, according to Google, the only Android version vulnerable to Heartbleed, it remains in use in millions of smartphones and tablets. Android 4.1.1 devices have been shown to leak significant amount of data in a “reverse Heartbleed” attack.

Facebook Open-Sources PlanOut, a Framework for Online Field Experiments

PlanOut is Facebook’s language for online field experiments supporting “A/B tests,” factorial designs, and more. According to Facebook, PlanOut makes possible to separate experimental design from application code and allows experimenters to concisely describe their designs. Facebook claims to be using PlanOut to run over a thousand experiments each day that involve hundreds of millions of people.

Google Releases First Development Kit for Project ARA, its New Modular Smartphone Platform

Google has released a Module Developers Kit (MDK) for Project Ara, an initiative that aims to develop a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. The MDK defines the Ara platform for module developers and provides reference implementations for various design features. Main goals of the ARA platform are being low cost and creating a rich module ecosystem.