Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

The system apps layer

This is the topmost layer where the user can interact directly with the device. There are two kinds of applications—preinstalled applications and user-installed applications. Preinstalled applications—such as dialer, web browser, and contacts—come along with the device. User-installed applications can be downloaded from different places, such as Google Play Store, Amazon Marketplace, and so on. Everything that you see on your phone (contacts, mail, camera, and so on) is an application.

So far, we have learned about the Android architecture and the important building blocks. We shall now dive into some of the inherent security features in the Android operating system.