[brucehart]

I think one day in the near future, there will be a major malware attack on mobile phones. There are few checks that go into updates on mobile phones. All someone needs to do is find an app that has a large install base and put together a malicious update package. Many popular apps are written by hobbyists and one-man operations. An attacker could just pay off the original authors or find some sort of simple backdoor (such as an author accidentally uploading their account information to a public repo).

The damaging code could be obfuscated and compiled into a binary module. In order to prevent Google (or Apple) from shutting down updates before it reaches too many people, the malware payload could trigger at a certain time or based on a network command once the update is installed everywhere.

Imagine someone flooding Verizon's network with traffic at a coordinated time and bringing the network down. Or rending a large percentage of iOS products inoperable during a WWDC keynote. There would be a lot of money to be made by shorting the stock of the affected companies.