dissertation

Chapter 3AndroidAndroid is an open collection of software intended for running on mobilephones. Developed by the Open Handset Alliance [29], it is a completesoftware stack, with operating system, middleware and end-user applications.Estimates of its share of the smartphone market in 2012 vary between 50%[39] and 60% [47].At its core, the Android system has a Linux kernel with some Androidspecificmodifications. The rest of the system is almost entirely Androidspecific,with the majority of the code being written in Java and running inthe Dalvik [20] virtual machine.3.1 Content providersThe Android system includes the SQLite database [32] for storing structureddata, e.g. the contact list. To simplify the job of each application whichwants to use the data, Android wraps each database in an application calleda content provider [1]. The content provider provides a simple CRUD 1 interfaceto other applications, and regular Linux file system access control makessure that the content provider is the only application allowed to touch thedatabase file directly. This means that the content provider can be solely1 An acronym for the four fundamental operations exposed: Create, Read, Update, andDelete [69, p. 381]12