Articles About Android

22September

Relying on Sole Expert Witness, Samsung Wins Patent Case…Twice

By Quandary Peak Research

Samsung prevailed in the retrial of a patent infringement case earlier this month as the jury found the asserted patents to be valid but not infringed. Quandary Peak software expert Dr. Nenad Medvidovic was called as an expert witness by Samsung in both the original trial, which took place in July, and the retrial, which was ordered after the jury was given documents accidentally. Dr. Medvidovic was the only witness called by Samsung’s counsel, Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

The plaintiff in the case, Cascades Computer Innovation LLC, was dubbed the “original patent troll” by IP Law & Business magazine back in 2006. The company has been buying up patents to assert against technology companies since the late 1990s. Recent trends, however, seem to indicate that patent activity by non-practicing entities may be declining.

More details about the case can be found at Law360.

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8February

Quandary Peak Assists in Nokia v. HTC Patent Litigation

By Quandary Peak Research

Nokia’s recent settlement with HTC over smartphone patents was widely reported in the media on Friday, resulting in the dismissal of all pending patent litigation worldwide between the two companies. Industry observers widely cited the outcome as an important step for Nokia in its effort to generate royalties from its patent portfolio.

Right up until the settlement was finalized, several of our software experts here at Quandary Peak were working earnestly with the attorneys at Desmarais LLP on behalf of Nokia. Nenad Medvidovic, George Edwards, and Brad Ulrich were all down in the trenches, performing the painstaking work of documenting the technical evidence related to the patents-in-suit in the matters before the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patents disclosed inventions related to receiving push messages, downloading and installing apps over the network, video compression and encoding, protecting sensitive device configuration data, Bluetooth connectivity, calendar data management, and other technologies. The analysis by Quandary Peak included C++ source code review and Java source code review.

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31January

Fresh Ideas for Addressing Mobile Software Security Vulnerabilities

By Sam Malek

Security has become the Achilles’ heel of most modern software systems. Techniques ranging from manual inspection to automated static and dynamic code analyses are commonly employed to identify security vulnerabilities prior to the release of software. However, these techniques are time-consuming and cannot keep pace with the growth of software repositories, such as Google Play and the Apple App Store, that host millions of apps.

An opportunity to tackle this issue is presented by the fact that the software products in these repositories are increasingly being organized into categories. Some examples are SourceForge for open source and Google Play for Android applications. In addition to helping users search and browse for apps, categorized repositories have been shown to be good predictors of the common features found within software of a particular category.

In a recent publication, Quandary Peak software expert Prof. Sam Malek and his team of researchers at George Mason University show that knowing the category of an Android application is sufficient for accurately predicting the types of security vulnerabilities that application may have. The approach works by mining a large number of apps available on the public app markets (e.g., Google Play). The apps are then analyzed for known security vulnerabilities, which can be detected through a variety of static analysis tools. The vulnerabilities detected in these apps are then used to build a classifier that can determine with a very high accuracy the types of security vulnerabilities one may encounter in a new app of a certain category.

This research has significant implications for the consumers and app market operators, as it allows them to determine the types of security risks posed by applications of different category without requiring any specialized tools or detailed analysis of the software. It could also help a security analyst to target the […]

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25September

Smartphone Patent Wars: Timeline of the Apple v. Samsung Legal Battle

By George Edwards

Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of intellectual property lawsuits involving Apple Inc. (who, ahem, does not like to be called Apple, Inc.). Apple went after Digital Research and Microsoft during the ’80s and ’90s for copying the “look and feel” of the Macintosh OS. But in the last five years, Apple has initiated a flurry of litigation, commonly known as the mobile device patent wars, that is likely to have profound legal and historical significance.http:

The back-and-forth legal sparring has been largely between Apple and Samsung, with suits over both design and utility patents that have captivated the legal community, investors, and followers of software patent litigation. Below, we highlight some of the important milestones in this high stakes legal tussle.

Click the image for a graphical view of the timeline.

April 15, 2011: Apple files complaint in US District Court for the Northern District of California against Samsung for patent infringement of iPhone and iPad. At the heart of the suit are three design patents or trade dress infringements. Apple accuses Samsung of “slavishly” copying their products in a way that was so “pervasive” as to make them indistinguishable from one another.

June 2011: Samsung countersues Apple over infringement of 3G data transfer features and nine other patents in South Korea, Japan, and Germany.

August 9, 2011: Apple wins a design-related preliminary injunction to halt sales of Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the European Union. Samsung appeals.

August 16, 2011: The injunction banning sales ban of Galaxy 10.1 lifted in European Union, but not in Germany.

September 2011: Apple’s injunction upheld in German courts. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales remain halted there. Shortly after, Dutch […]

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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9September

Wireless and Mobile Tech Trends: Tablet Data Usage and Android Jelly Bean

By Quandary Peak Research

Cellular data usage for tablets is up a marked 48% year on year in the first quarter of 2013, according to a data consumption report released by consumer market research firm NPD Group. This isn’t a huge surprise, considering people are increasingly shifting video consumption and web browsing to tablets, and given consumers use cellular when Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots, or tethering aren’t options.

A 48% jump in data usage may seem sizable, but it still only brings cellular usage for tablets to 12% of the total market in the US—meaning only three out of every twenty-five tablets are using cellular. Taken together with Consumer Electronics Association’s survey showing that 41 percent of the online US consumers polled already own a tablet and 72 percent plan to purchase one soon, this is an indication that there is significant market share for cellular data usage (and tablets) up for grabs.

What Does That Mean for Google’s Jelly Bean?

This past July, after much speculation and fanfare, Google finally released a new update to its Android operating system. Dubbed Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, it’s not available for everyone. Google has reserved the July release exclusively for its own line of products like the new Nexus 7. Reports, however, suggest that it will soon be available for widespread use.

Early chatter from the user community seems to indicate that Android 4.3 is making devices run faster, and in particular, Kevin C. Tofel reports that users of 2012 Nexus tablets are experiencing much better performance. On gigaom.com, Tofel highlights a specific software command in Android 4.3 called TRIM that works like “the old Disk Defragmenter on Microsoft Windows PCs which cleaned up the file system and put contiguous file bits in order on the hard drive to speed up I/O performance.”

Another interesting […]

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31August

Android’s Stagefright Media Player Architecture

By Ivo Krka

A significant portion of today’s mobile devices run on top of Android OS. One of the reasons for the widespread adoption of Android is its open source nature. While this allows any programmer to look beyond the basic API (referred to as the Application Framework), understanding and modifying the lower layers of the Android stack is difficult. This becomes apparent as soon as you download the huge 12 GB of Android’s source code. In addition, while the Application Framework’s Java code is accompanied with detailed comments, the remainder of the code base is not thoroughly documented (if at all). To make things worse, the undocumented part of the code base is more complex, uses intricate IPC mechanisms, and switches between programming languages.

In this article, I present the architecture of the media playback infrastructure (with Stagefright as the underlying media player). My goal is to help you, an interested reader, get a grasp of how things work behind the curtains, and to help you more easily identify the part of the code base you may want to tweak or optimize. Some useful online resources already outline certain bits and pieces of the media player architecture (1 2), but the slideshow format of these descriptions omits a number of important details.

Overall Structure

The architecture of the media player infrastructure, from the end-user apps to the media codecs that perform the algorithmic magic, is layered with many levels of indirection. The following diagram depicts the high-level architecture described below.

At the topmost layer of the architecture are the user apps that leverage media playback functionality, such as playing audio streams, ringtones, or video clips. These apps use the components from the Application Framework that implement the high-level interfaces for accessing and manipulating media content. Below this layer, things get more complicated […]

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7August

Code Review of Android and Windows Devices Completed

By Quandary Peak Research

Software consultants at Quandary Peak recently completed an lengthy, in-depth source code review of twenty-nine mobile devices running the Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. The consultants, George Edwards and Brad Ulrich, drew on their many years of experience in smartphone application development and mobile systems research to document the structure and behavior of the software components at issue. Both Brad and George have worked on a number of cases as an Android expert witness.

The extensive analysis effort was conducted on behalf of Desmarais LLP in connection with a patent infringement matter, MobileMedia Ideas LLC v. HTC Corporation and HTC America Inc. The case initially involved eleven patents for smartphone technology related to voice dialing, call handling, contacts management, media playback and streaming, and image processing. The patents asserted by MMI were U.S. Patents 5,490,170, 5,841,979, 5,915,239, 5,977,887, 6,043,760, 6,049,796, 6,070,068, 6,253,075, 6,427,078, 6,871,048, and 7,349,012.

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6August

Rationales for Software Patent Protection

By Quandary Peak Research

Legal scholars point to a handful of philosophical theories as the basis for the moral judgment that patents on technology are just and beneficial to society. Are these theories valid in the context of the modern software industry? In particular, do the unique characteristics of software, in contrast to other forms of technology, make the traditional rationales used to justify patents less valid for software patents?

The “Natural Rights” Justification

John Locke, a 17th century English philosopher, developed the intellectual foundation for the natural rights justification for patents. Put very simply, this argument posits that individuals have a right to ownership of their own labor, and when people apply their labor to create things of value, they obtain ownership of those things. As applied to patents, this theory argues that inventors have invested their labor to design a process or machine, and are entitled to own that process or machine.

Does this theory hold up in practical terms, when viewed in the context of the modern software industry? For the most part, yes: there are very few who question whether software engineers deserve to own the fruits of their labor.

One problem, however, with applying the natural rights rationale to software patents is that it doesn’t take much effort to imagine an abstract computer program that does something useful that no one has done before; all the hard work is in making it work well. Thinking of what you want a program to do is much easier than making it reliable, scalable, user-friendly, and so on. If “inventing” doesn’t require actually implementing the program in a way that has measurable quality, people don’t actually need to do much work to obtain a software patent.

The patent law contains a requirement for “enablement” that is supposed to ensure that inventors disclose how to make their inventions […]

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29July

What Mobile Platform Will Get Me App Revenue?

By Ivo Krka

Developing a smartphone app takes a considerable time commitment, and, unless you’re doing it purely for fun, prospective revenue is a motivating factor. In the second part of my Guide for First-Time App Developers series, I discuss the current state of the smartphone app market and the opportunities to consider when choosing a target platform. I provide information about how many potential users to expect, how engaged and willing to try new apps those users will be, and what level of competition you will face. Since the smartphone market is growing at a rapid pace, the presented opinions include my personal projections, so take them with a grain of salt. As in the first article of the series, I focus on two platform giants – Apple’s iPhone and Android – and the slowly-but-steadily emerging Windows Phone platform. At the end of each section below, I will specify a color-coded rating of each platform (red-yellow-green, with red being the worst and green being the best).

Size of the User Base

Generating app revenue depends on having a reasonably large base of prospective users. While the iPhone is very popular in the US, with a market share upwards of 40% (only slightly behind Android), the undisputed worldwide champion is Android with more than 70% of new smartphone shipments (more than 200 million new units every year!). One obstacle for Apple in the global market is that many non-US users prefer more affordable phones, so in some large markets like Russia and China, Apple’s share has decreased. In addition, a number of service providers abroad refuse to pay a high premium to sell Apple’s iPhones. Working in favor of Apple is their devoted customer base, and once (if?) they figure out how to attract international users, they could bite […]

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