Category: Apps

The new version of the application provides Android device users with an alternative to the default on their devices.

Google has now launched a brand new mobile app for the Play store that will offer users of Android devices another option other than the default clock application that comes with devices based on that operating system.

There are several mobile applications that have been developed by Google that users can now download.

This new Google Clock Application is considered to be a stock mobile app that users can obtain for free. It provides a broader spectrum of services such as location, to pinpoint one or several spots that the user wants to have displayed on his or her device home screen. Also notable about this particular version of the mobile application is that a new update is put out with each official rollout of the Android operating system.

The mobile app doesn’t demand too much space and combines features often contained in several common apps.

This mobile application requires a device to run on at least Android 4.4 KitKat and needs about 6.6 MB of disk space to operate. It not only offers the current time to the user, but it also provides a number of additional features such as weather attributes and animations such as sunrise, sunset, sunshine, and rain.

The app has been designed to match the color schemes and themes of the device upon which it is running and is a stock app for users of Nexus devices. While there has been some criticism of the Google Clock application because it doesn’t have different face changes available and the color changing opportunity isn’t there, it has still managed to bring in some rather healthy ratings of nearly 4 (3.8) out of 5 stars, so far, from nearly 9,000 ratings.

Other frustrations that have been mentioned about this mobile app is that while it is helpful to be able to have several cities displayed on the home screen, there doesn’t appear to be any way to sort them. The user needs to settle for the way that they are automatically displayed. While this wouldn’t be problematic with two or three cities, more than that could cause a bit of a challenge to users.

Researchers in Germany have now identified a common weakness in programming practices.

A research team in Germany has now stated that they have found a common poor programming practice that has left a flaw that could lead to a mobile security exposure that risks data breaches for millions of app users.

The method of authenticating users could potentially place the personal data of those individuals at risk.

The flaw in the programming could potentially expose the personal data of the users of the apps in which the developers used those mobile security practices. The reason is because of the method by which the app developers authenticate users during the data storage and retrieval processes with cloud databases, such as the Amazon Web Services and Parse at Facebook. The reasearchers are from the Darmstadt University of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology.

The researchers identified the mobile security flaw by looking into 750,000 Google Play and Apple Store apps.

What the researchers found was that many of them use mobile authentication strategies by way of basic API-tokens, despite the fact that there are other methods readily available that are considered to be notably more secure.

This app development strategy is in direct opposition to the advice for best practices that has been issues by cloud storage providers. According to a statement made by Amazon Web Services, they have been advised of a “small number” of mobile app developers who have apps that hold AWS credentials. It said that it is their belief that those developers have “inadvertently embedded their own AWS credentials within their mobile applications, which could lead to unauthorized use of the developer’s AWS services and data.”

The statement also pointed out that AWS took the step to communicate directly with each of those developers in order to offer them guidance for the removal of their credentials from the apps. They also took the step to “encourage them to carefully examine their AWS resources for unauthorised activity and provide assistance as needed.”

The German team’s leader, Professor Eric Bodden said that this was a significant mobile security issue, as they were able to identify 56 million unprotected data sets.