Android

The academic peer review process can often be frustrating — not only for junior members of the research community. In this blog post, in the name of full transparency, I walk through a particular example of a process that took nearly 3 years from start to final publication. The main lessons are that iterations help the quality of a paper, and that persistence can pay off (but no guarantees).

Android is the most widely deployed end-user focused operating system. With its growing set of use cases encompassing communication, …

Android has different types of lock states. This post summarizes what they are, what their purpose is, and how the interact.

Android defines not only an operating system / platform, but a complete ecosystem with more form factors than just smart phones. In …

GadgetBridge for Android allows syncing locally with various wearable devices such as wristbands and watches. As they are typically connected through Bluetooth (LE), migration to a new device - or after reinstalling GadgetBridge on the same device - often invalidates the connection. This is a summary of how previous database history can be migrated to such a new installation.

The Android ecosystem is immense, represents a diverse manifold of use cases and participants, and is therefore highly complex. At the …

Android security trade-offs: Rooting “Rooting” has been part of the Android ecosystem pretty much since its creation. Within the context of this blog post, I define rooting as a method to disable standard sandboxing mechanisms for particular processes, which is a superset of Nick Kralevich’s earlier definition because many posts mix up the intentional, user-driven root access with exploitation of vulnerabilities.

Android security trade-offs The Android ecosystem is highly diverse, complex, and has many different stakeholders typically not visible in the limelight. Consequently, making decisions about features in the platform itself — what we call AOSP (Android Open Source Project) — is hard, and often in surprising ways.