7 ms·

I felt more concerned by the behavior of the Facebook and Whatsapp applications as the author described them. At first guess, the poor notification for new mess

by nokya 11y ago

I felt more concerned by the behavior of the Facebook and Whatsapp applications as the author described them. At first guess, the poor notification for new messages might reflect the absence of a proper multitasking OS. On the other side, chances for these applications to be legit seem quite low considering that nobody seems to have any clue where and by whom these phones are manufactured. This constitutes a big opportunity for a serious widespread scam scheme being built up (or already operational). Any security folks looking into it?

gbl08ma 11y ago
It is probably using the official J2ME "apps" for Facebook and Whatsapp. I think it's about as dangerous as trusting any pre-installed app on feature phones and even smart phones. About the "absence of a proper multitasking OS", well, that's what many/most non-smart phones have even today. I think my first phone that supported J2ME software would not properly receive messages while the JVM was running, and the handling of phone calls was jerky. If you received a call the application/game would be terminated abruptly, causing any state to be lost. Yeah, that's how most phones worked ten years ago - forget any sort of background tasks, be them Java apps or music (MIDI!) playing. Not all phones were as bad, though: Symbian-based ones, for example had some sort of multitasking IIRC, but these also tended to be more expensive.