App research specialist VisionMobile has published the latest version of its Developer Economics report, providing insights into mobile application development worldwide.

It estimates that 2.3 million people were mobile app developers in 2013, with 760,000 (32.9%) of them living in Asia and 680,000 (29.7%) in Europe.

This week's podcast starts with Lenovo's purchase of the Motorola Mobility smartphone business. Was it a good deal for everyone?

We also talk about network infrastructure sharing in the UK, mobile malware, 3G coverage, misleading apps, mobile advertising, Samsung's retail plans and global tablet sales.

A new report from Alcatel-Lucent suggests that more than 11.6 million mobile devices are infected with malware. It’s based on figures from Alcatel-Lucent’s Kindsight subsidiary, which is able to measure the impact of network traffic.

Mobile malware infections were said to be up by 20% in 2013, with 4G LTE devices the most likely to be infected.

Mark Bridge writes:

Recent figures released by ABI Research have prompted the market intelligence company to ask whether Google is losing control of the Android ecosystem.

At first glance, Android dominated smartphone shipments for the final quarter of 2013. ABI Research says 77% of the 287 million smartphones shipped in Q4 2013 were running Android.

Google is selling its Motorola Mobility mobile phone business to Lenovo for $2.91 billion (£1.76bn). Lenovo, which already produces Android smartphones, will maintain Motorola as a separate brand.

Google will keep most of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, although it will license these to Lenovo.