Google’s Android is generally considered as the most widely used mobile operating system in the face of the planet. Part of what makes the platform so popular is its open source nature, which basically means that various phone makers and wireless service providers can do their own tweaks depending on what is best for their devices or networks.
However, the burden of rolling out the latest Android updates often lies on the hands of these mobile manufacturers, and it usually takes some time before the newest Android version can actually land on a specific smartphone or tablet make or model. What is worse is that there are times when potentially important security updates are missed.
This is basically what a research crew from Security Research Labs had found out when it conducted a recent study. What the researchers did was test about 1,200 Android devices from all the big phone brands over a period of a couple of years. The objective of the study was to determine if phone makers really did deploy every security patch as claimed.
The Security Research Labs team then shared its findings to Wired, and the results are quite interesting, to say the least. For one, it turns out that a lot of mobile devices have skipped security patches, including handsets from very popular phone brands. Some of the familiar names include Samsung (the number one smartphone vendor in the world) and Sony. The sad thing is that a few of these manufacturers are claiming that their security patches were up to date.
Which other big names are mentioned in Security Research Labs’ study? They include LG, Motorola, HTC, Nokia, and Xiaomi. According to the researchers, ZTE and TCL (which has licensed the BlackBerry brand name) are among the most poor when it comes to rolling out security patches, with both on average not having installed over four of the patches they have claimed to have already deployed.
Google has actually learned of Security Research Labs’ findings, and as told to TechCrunch, the tech giant has thanked researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Kell for helping find weaknesses in the Android platform. According to Google, it is sometimes possible that device makers employ an alternate security update that is different from the one recommended by Google, and it is now coordinating with the researchers in order to also take those other security patches into account. Google also took the opportunity to point out that while security patches are important, they are only one of several layers of protection utilized on Android powered handsets.
