There are growing concerns among security experts on what they feel is a threat to the Android phone users who have also downloaded Amazon apps like Amazon Prime Video. Google takes a lot of care and does a variety of testing routines before allowing any app to be included in the Play Store. But Amazon works on a system where some 800,000 apps have been allowed to be developed specially for Amazon and are sitting on the Amazon store. Almost all these apps are dubbed as being from “unknown sources”. This, the experts feel, is where the real danger can come from.
There is the Amazon Underground but that isn’t allowed on the Play Store. The difficulty is the moment you install any other Amazon app, there may be the need for you to permit content from ‘unknown sources’ to be accessed by your phone and that precisely is the issue that is being highlighted here.
The situation gets a little complex here. Amazon offers many of its services only through Amazon Underground. One typical example is the Amazon Prime Video. It has become popular and it is common knowledge that millions would have subscribed to this app and therefore Amazon Underground is already installed on such a large number of Android devices and it appears Amazon acknowledges this fact. The company advises that phone users should exercise caution and allow apps to be downloaded and installed only from trusted sources like Amazon.
But then, the moment the user confirms that apps from unknown sources can also be allowed to be downloaded, a complete layer of Android’s security to your phone gets lowered and this is the threat the experts are warning against, going ahead.
The efforts by sites like Amazon to somehow seek a small sacrifice from their customers in order to push their products and services nullifies the enormous amount of pain the original OS makers like Google (Android) and Apple (iOS) take to provide a secure environment to their customers while using their devices.
The firm advice from the security analysts and experts is to just switch off the unknown sources option on your phone and be safe.