Smartphone operating systems: Evaluation & enhancements

The increasing number of mobile operating systems that operate the small hand held devices collectively called Smartphones, have become an integral part of our lives. The openness of these new environments has lead to new domain of apps and markets and has enabled greater integration with existing online services like e-banking etc. Smartphone makers are competing in turns to outgun each other for storage, processor speed, platform compatibility and camera megapixels but it's the predominantly software - the mobile OS - that makes the biggest divergence to the popularity and market share of Smartphone. This paper evaluates the popular Smartphone Operating Systems with the purpose of understanding the user friendliness, popularity, user privacy, security and accessibility with respect to the wide domain of apps. This paper focuses on the advantages and limitations of the Smartphone operating systems with the intention to determine if one of them has an edge over the other and, finally, we propose broad enhancements aimed at making them more user-friendly and secure.