Google has published a 44-page report on Android security in 2014.
It’s lengthy, so if you’ve only got a minute, we pulled out a few of the key findings here:
- Over 1 billion devices are protected with Google Play which conducts 200 million security scans of devices per day.
- Fewer than 1% of Android devices had a Potentially Harmful App (PHA) installed in 2014. Fewer than 0.15% of devices that only install from Google Play had a PHA installed.
- The overall worldwide rate of Potentially Harmful Application (PHA) installs decreased by nearly 50% between Q1 and Q4 2014.
- SafetyNet checks over 400 million connections per day for potential SSL issues.
- Android and Android partners responded to 79 externally reported security issues, and over 25,000 applications in Google Play were updated following security notifications from Google Play.
Not bad. If only all smartphone operating system vendors were this open and detailed with their security data.
So they have finally rooted out all the malware flashlight apps from google play? *quick check* No, no they haven’t.
*Stays unimpressed by their security*
Oh so you’re aware of a bunch of Playstore apps that are actively being used to distribute malware? You’ve reported all of them to Google, right?
Name them please.
Thom is impressed. News at 11.
In other news: Volunteer Apple-shill gives in to psychological compulsion to astroturf any post that could potentially be interpreted as reflecting positively on Google.
Film at 12.
That’s funny. I’ve bought a grand total of one apple product in my lifetime, and that’s an iPod touch. Yep I’m a huge apple fan.
Edited 2015-04-04 17:08 UTC
I’m just going to put this here:
http://www.osnews.com/user/uid:3121/comments
Case == rested.
I was only able to glance through it (Not too interested – not an Android use), but the report doesn’t seem to at all even TOUCH on the fact that a huge share of Android users are using older versions with known exploits because there is no ability to upgrade without buying a new device.
So Google says they they monitor “1 billion devices”, which are safe. Then you add there is a “huge share” of vulnerable devices, which is some other billions? How many billions of Android devices are out there?
How many known vulnerabilities are you aware of, besides WebView, which is addressed multiple times in the document?