In today’s world, a smartphone became a very integral part of human activities, calls, events, map guides, content consumption, professional photography, social media and what not, everything is available in smartphones. There is a high chance that you might be reading this article in your handheld device. In fact, there are more number of smartphones than people on earth today, which is not an exaggeration, the amount of data that is generated, stored and transferred to and from smartphones are enormous, increasing the amount of storage capacities and fast read write speeds of storage media made this happen. That is where the problem begins, the more amount of data there is the more amount of risk it has to be stolen or leaked or misused. Although phone manufacturers are doing everything they can to prevent abuse of information available at disposal, smartphones are not fully ready to beat the game when it comes to security standpoint. Both the major platforms, Android and iOS, are taking big steps in providing privacy and security to the consumers. There are still some loopholes that pose potential threats.
The recent report given by NIST, the Android operating system topped the list with 414 vulnerabilities.
In a statement to Fast Company, an executive from Google For Android said
“We’re committed to transparency and release public security bulletins monthly on issues that have been fixed in Android to harden the security of the ecosystem. We disagree with the notion that measuring the number of security issues fixed in an OS is any indication of the security of the platform. This is actually a result of the openness of the Android ecosystem working as intended.”
In Google’s defense what is said is accurate, google is releasing security patches every month as they were discovered, so even if there are some critical bugs from Google’s side, they never stopped fixing them (unless they are too old or practically useless versions of android). So if you are one of the Pixel Phone users then depending on your model there is a higher chance that you will get not just feature updates but also security updates before everyone else, That would have been the ultimate thing to do if it was Apple.
Apple’s iOS is proprietary software which no one except Apple Inc will have access to, which means no customizing and no tampering of the OS integrity, which is not a great thing when it comes to tech savvy consumers, but it is a very good strategy for people who are not into tech and enjoy their smartphone experience as is. Again, there are people who jailbreak iOS to get a few additional features, we can do that if we know what we are dealing with. But in android case unlike iOS, android is publicly available for any developers to use and customize according to their need, so most of the smartphone manufacturers take the core OS and add their own features and custom skins to their liking, and that is a big issue when it comes to security.
In the process of customizing and adding their own feature smartphone manufacturers can introduce new vulnerabilities, otherwise they are stable and secure operating systems. Which are not being monitored or controlled by google most of the part. If the manufacturer is big enough like Google, OnePlus or MI to have a developer base and user base there is a chance that it will get reported and get solved otherwise, that bug exists in the OS version as long as it will. Other than that, there are lots of smartphone manufacturers who do not even provide updates to their users, Samsung used to be one of them, and there are tens of more companies like that and if you use one of those smartphone models that is when you should be worried. To avoid this issue only google introduced Android one program if you have a smartphone that is part of google one program you should get at least 2 years of updates which is good enough time.
So final words will be when you are buying a phone don’t just look for RAM and processor and other hardware stuff, look for how secure the phone is as well, otherwise you will be the victim of attacks performed on those mobile devices.
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