Etikettarkiv: market

English

Phishing attempt or real?

2 kommentarer
Edit: As you can see in the comments below the email was actually legit.

I recently got an email from what appears to be the manufacturer of an app I am using on my Android phone. The app in question is the GeotagPhotos Pro, which records GPS locations and time to a database, then when you take pictures using your digital camera (not the mobile camera) providing the camera’s time is set to the same time the GPS has it will then be able to geotag your pictures after you have downloaded them from the camera.

I have used this software for a few months now and out of the blue I get the following email from what appears to be a legitimate email from the manufacturer:

Dear Geotag Photos Pro user,

recently, we got information from Android Market / App Store about all licences of Geotag Photos Pro. When mathed with users in our database, we were unable to find valid licence for your account. This can be just bug in licence database, so that please if you are sure, that you bought our application officially, please send us your order id. You can find it in orders history in Google Checkout (for Android) or in iTunes (for iPhone). We apologize all legal users for this inconvenience.

If you downloaded our app from another source, than official store (Android Market or AppStore), please consider of buying  official full version. To help you with this, we will make ”licence amnesty” this Wed, April the 6th, when Geotag Photos Pro will be offered with 50% discount – for $1.99 instead of $3.99.

Please contact our support staff, if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Jindrich Sarson
CEO of TappyTaps

I find this deeply disturbing. All the signs of a bad phishing attempt is here, the bad spelling (however the manufacturer is a Czhech company which may explain that in part, but the idea of sending payment credentials from the Android Market and Google checkout is deeply disturbing to me.

I have contacted the manufacturer to ask them to verify that they actually are who they claim to be but if they, as they claim, have a problem with their licencing database they should be able to verify the data with the raw payment data from Google Checkout that they as a seller receives.

There is also no information about this problem on their home page and this leads me to suspect foul business and that this is not legitimate. Otherwise I should think that there would be at least a mention about this…

We will see what comes back…

English

Android tip for reset

Testing new applications on your Android is great fun. Eventually you might come across one that crashes your phone badly and you need to factory reset. This is when you will be happy that you put all your contacts and appointments and everything else into the google cloud because it will just re-sync that data and be happy.

Resetting an android phone may be a hassle, especially if you do not remember all the names of the apps and widgets you are using. If you are having any data on your SD-card and you want to make 100% sure it is saved, remove the card when you reset the phone. So far it has never touched the data for me on the SD card but then again I might be lucky.

The reset is performed by:

  1. Remove the battery from phone
  2. Install battery again
  3. Press and hold ”home” key and power on key at the same time.
  4. Phone starts and when the logo or boot symbol is displayed, press both buttons again.
  5. You will get into a menu where you can wipe your phone.

If you have your contatcs, appointments etc in the cloud, i.e. synced with Google then it is not such a problem but you will loose all your nice downloaded applications.

However, the first time you log back into the Market app to download new apps it will still have your old apps in the ”My Downloads” list. However, if you download new apps and then leave the market app and come back they are lost. But the first time you can quickly get your apps back!