The first commercial handheld phone in the US appeared in 1983 and cost over US$8,00 in today's dollars.[1] Rampant growth followed.
By December 2009, the US had 286 million mobile subscribers covering 91 percent of the population.[2] Other nations have been adding mobile devices at an even faster pace. The world contained some 4.6 billion active mobile phones at the start of 2010. [3] As of June 2010, China had 775 million mobile subscribers[4] covering 58 percent of the population. China's overall wireless subscribership was growing at a rate of 15.4 percent per year in the third quarter of 2009.[5] The overall Asian Pacific region houses 39 percent of the broadband market and supports 42 percent of all Internet users. This region also has the largest number of cell phone users in the world.[6] Furthermore, it's rumored that over 50 billion mobile devices will be in use worldwide in 2020.
But what about the apps, which provide the functionality of devices? Hundreds of thousands of different apps for mobile devices are available through commercial stores and open source repositories. Billions of copies of these apps have been purchased, and this number is projected to increase dramatically. However, with this growth comes an increase in the spread of potentially dangerous security vulnerabilities. Because of an app's low cost and high proliferation, the threat of these vulnerabilities could be far greater than that of traditional computers.