“Google’s head of Android security David Kleidermacher claimed in an interview that ‘Android is now as safe as the competition’ on the release of the company’s 2017 Android Security report, which seeks to reassure users that it is doing everything it can to protect them from malware and exploits,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “The problem is that Google can’t secure the 2 billion Androids it claims as its platform.”
“Kleidermacher’s claim, made during a media tour surrounding the release of its Android Security 2017 Year in Review, sounds a lot like one made in 2014 by Google’s former chairman Eric Schmidt, who similarly boasted to the media that ‘our systems are far more secure and encrypted than anyone else, including Apple,'” Dilger writes. “That was not true at the time and remains false today. A large number of Androids don’t even support Full Disk Encryption, which has been on by default on iOS for years.”
“Google and its partners have also been doing a poor job of getting full Android updates to users,” Dilger writes. “Over the first four months since its release, iOS 11 found its way to 65 percent of iOS devices, and only seven percent of Apple’s installed base were using something earlier than iOS 10. On Android’s side, barely one percent were running Oreo, and only 28 percent were running the iOS 10-era Nougat. Nearly seventy percent of active phones in use were running a version of Android more than two years old.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google’s head of Android security’s thinking is as flawed as the iOS wannabe he’s trying to peddle.
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