Android Watch Wear BuG : Cyber Ransom

[enim]

Android Watch Wear BuG

Pay for an app and then deal with its malfunctioning, keep on paying endlessly

Google's hot new item, Android Wear, is barely out of the box, but there's already a pretty big issue deserving of a place in our Bug Watch series. The initial rush of native Android Wear apps is starting to roll into the Play Store as developers get their hands dirty with the freshly released SDK. So far, most of these apps have been given away at no cost, but the few that have attempted to charge a fee have run into a wall. It seems that paid apps on the Play Store are incapable of installing Android Wear components to a device.

The Problem

Unlike most Android devices, the app installation experience for Android Wear could be described as very codependent. Instead of pulling up a bunch of Play Store listings on a screen barely larger than your thumb, Google has organized it so the apps on your phone will install their own micro-sized companions to your watch. When a regular Android app is downloaded from the Play Store, it is checked for a Wear-compatible app, which is then installed over Bluetooth to the paired watch. The process is completely automated, and aside from manually side-loading apks, it's currently the only supported way to install apps to Wear.

Paid apps introduce a complication in the form of App Encryption. First announced at Google I/O 2012 alongside Jelly Bean 4.1, App Encryption was added to the Play Store to encode paid apps with a device-specific key, making them more difficult to crack or transplant by would-be pirates. Despite some early issues that lead Google to temporarily take App Encryption offline, it has gone mostly unnoticed since it was re-enabled. That is, until now. It seems the Android Wear install process runs into a road block with paid apps because it doesn't know how to extract the file of the encrypted apk. Since the installer fails to recognize the payload, it assumes there is nothing to install and silently aborts. This behavior appears to match another known issue that occurs if the Wear app is compressed more than once before it is published.

Information about this behavior began to surface over the last couple of days from a few different sources - most notably after the release of an app called Phone Finder by redthunda69 and a custom watch face by Daniel Ward (the issue was diagnosed by Kevin Barry of Tesla Coil).

Cyber Bully Google is emerging out for Cyber Ransom.

[TreeTops]

Do you really thing people will flock to those monster watches? We'll see. I betting that they will sell a few to the early adopters but not to main stream.