Research company Coverity have announced the results of its Open Source Integrity Report 2010 , which addresses the security of many of the worlds open source operating systems.

Android, the popular mobile operating system, was one of the operating systems tested and the results don't look great for Googles software.

The report showed that the Android Froyo Kernel had 359 software defects and that 25 per cent of these were high risk defects that cause crashes or security breaches. The company listed that common high risk defects include memory corruptions, null pointer de-references and resource leaks.

The results of this study might hinder Androids push to become the business phone operating system of choice over Blackberry.

However, the results are better than average with Andy Chou, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Coverity saying  "The Coverity Scan results for the Android kernel we tested show a better than average defect density, meaning this specific kernel is shipping with fewer defects than the industry average for software of this size,".

Android is expected to become the second largest smartphone operating system by 2012 with an 18 per cent market share.