Recent smartphone platforms based on new operating systems, such as iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, have been a huge success in recent years and open up many new opportunities. Unfortunately, 2011 also showed us that the new technologies and the privacy‐related data on smartphones are also increasingly interesting for attackers. Especially, the Android platform has been the favorite target for malware, mainly because of the openness of the platform, the ability to install applications from other sources than the Android Market, and the significant gains in market share. Although the processes of detecting and analyzing malware are well known from the PC world, where the arms race between attackers and defenders has continued for the past 15 years, they cannot be directly applied to smartphone platforms because of differences in the hardware and software architectures. In this paper, we first give an overview of the current malware situation on smartphone platforms with a special focus on Android and explain relevant malware detection and analysis methods. It turns out that most of the current malware relies on the installation by the user, who represents the last line of defense in malware detection. With these conclusions, we then present a new malware detection method that focuses on the information that the user is able to see prior to the installation of an application—the metadata within the platform's software market. Depending on the platform, this includes the application's description, its permissions, the ratings, or information about the developer. To analyze these data, we use sophisticated knowledge discovery processes and lean statistical methods. By presenting a wide range of examples based on real application metadata extracted from the Android Market, we show the possibilities of the new method. With the possibilities, we argue that it should be an essential part of a complete malware analysis/detection chain that includes other well‐known methods such as network traffic analysis, or static, or dynamic code inspection. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This paper reports on collaborative work with an SME, developing a system for data acquisition in health care organisations, providing mobile data support. We briefly introduce the ICF and the ICD classification scheme from the WHO as a foundation for our mobile application. A two-staged usability evaluation in a very early stage of development allows us to integrate user-centred design in the mobile application development process. Our procedure comprises interviews and usability tests with a limited number of users and thus can even be performed within a resource-constrained setting as it is typically found in smaller software development teams. We discuss the consolidated results of the usability tests quantitatively and qualitatively. From these results we deduce recommendations (and open issues) concerning the user interface design of the mobile application.