Google Is Working to Make Android Phones Safer

Google is placing its focus on security by ensuring that Android devices can get timely security updates and removing harmful and malicious apps from the Play store.

According to Google, about half of the 1.4 billion Android devices in the world did not receive important security updates in 2016. Unlike iOS, the Android ecosystem is fragmented into hundreds of carriers and manufacturers with their own way of doing things — so pushing out updates to individuals oftentimes becomes a convoluted and complicated process. While Nexus and Pixel phones receive security fixes almost instantaneously after they are released, a Samsung phone, for example, might not. This year, Google is aiming to work with those companies to change that.

And the company is making progress: Google has gotten update wait time down from over six weeks to several days, according to TechCrunch. “In North American, just over 78 percent of flagship devices were current with the security update at the end of 2016,” Google’s security lead Adrian Ludwig told the publication. According to him, allowing Google’s update speed data to be shared among carriers and manufacturers is an important step in convincing them to release updates more quickly.

“It’s not about convincing them that it’s important — they already believe that — it’s about providing visibility into the specific status, which often they don’t have,” Ludwig said. “Because the ecosystem has so many parties, everyone knew the update rate was low but they thought it was caused by someone else. Providing the information allowed them to take action.”

Part of the process is getting carriers and manufacturers to view security fixes differently than feature updates — and to get them onto consumer devices more quickly. Google is also helping out by reducing update size to allow faster downloads, and nixing requirements that force users to approve every update. The company is also streamlining the process with A/B updates, which helps counter the possibility of bricked phones caused by over-the-air updating.

In addition to updates, Google is also doubling down on security by removing harmful apps from the Play store — mostly by increasing the number of times that they scan for potentially malicious applications. In 2016, the company performed 750 million daily scans, up from 450 million the previous year, Engadget reported. This has helped reduce the number of trojans in the Play store by 51.5 percent, backdoors by 30.5 percent, phishing malware by 73.4 percent and hostile downloaders by 54.6 percent.

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