Thinking about an Android phone? Google can delete your apps at will,

When Google announced that it had actually used its "kill switch" to remove Oberheide's applications, it didn't mention Oberheide – or his applications – by name. It merely said that it had removed "two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes" and that "these applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET."

The announcement came by way of a blog post from Android security lead Rich Cannings. "After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup," Cannings said.

With a blog post of his own, Oberheide – who works for the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based security startup Scio Security – later revealed that Google has removed a pair of applications he used to demonstrate how easy it would be to bootstrap a rootkit onto Android phones via the Android Market, Google's version of the App Store. Oberheide built an application dubbed RootStrap that periodically phoned home to retrieve native code that executed outside of Dalvik, the Android Java virtual machine. Then he distributed the tool through the Market in the guise of another application – Twilight Eclipse Preview – which purported to be a sneak peek of the upcoming Twilight teen vampire flick.