Google, touted as a leader in offering mobile operating systems to the world has announced that half of the devices working on Android OS have gotten security updates by the end of 2016. Thus, it enables the android OS users to defend themselves from any kind of digital crime and espionage.
In an annual report compiled by Google, the internet juggernaut updated the world that its Android OS versions were operating on over 1.4 billion devices.
If we take previous stats into account, till 2014, Google Play Store was hosting around 2.3% of malware hidden in some notorious apps. But now, Google disclosed that only 0.2% of malware was ending up in its Google play store on an annual note from the past couple of years.
But all doesn’t seem to be well on Google platform, as the web services giant, for the very first time, released solid data on Android’s most seriously nagging security problem.
The report says that the California-based company is facing a big challenge of getting dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of carriers around the world to collaborate on regularly patching Android phones and tablets with latest security updates.
On that point, the company is claiming that it is reaching just 50 percent of annual patching rate which it argues is still not remotely good enough. The company is determined to increase it to 75% by early next year and then plans to aim for 89% by the year end.
Android’s biggest challenge in the patching game appears to be the byzantine fragmentation of its operating system. For instance, Samsung alone offers 13 models to almost 200 telecom carriers, each of which runs a customized version of OS to a certain degree. So, all this accounts for the presence of 1,500 variations of every version of the software, says Henry Lee, the mobile security director of Samsung Electronics Mobile segment.
When compared to Apple’s iOS software update adoption, Google has struggled long way to get anywhere near to it. If we take some recently released facts into account, less than 2% of phones are running the latest version of Nougat update. But if we compare it with iOS 10 adoption rate, the adoption stats show that they have reached 80%.
Note- Nougat was released just three weeks before iOS 10.
Hope, Google addresses the patches mentioned in the Valut7 flaws leaked by Wikileaks and succeeds in keeping its other half of unprotected android users safe from hackers.
