It’s no secret that most people consider Apple’s iPhone much more secure than the typical Android offerings, largely due to Apple’s quick patching and strict App Store regulations, among other things. Now, though, the head engineer of security at Android claims otherwise.
The director of Android security, Adrian Ludwig, has stated that Google’s latest smartphone offerings are more or less “identical in terms of their platform-level” security. Over the past year, Google has tried hard to combat people’s doubts over security issues with the open-source platform by introducing monthly security patches. The company is so serious about securing the platform, in fact, that the head of security believes that the open nature of Android will become an advantage in the future and will eventually lead to Android being much more secure than Apple’s OS, due to the fact that the code of Android will constantly be being checked by a number of manufacturers, therefore increasing the chance of finding any security flaws.
Ludwig did, however, acknowledge the fact that delayed security updates by manufacturers, as well as the fact that many smartphones do not run the latest version of the platform, are constant concerns for the head of Android, especially in terms of security as many devices could be left vulnerable to attacks, and went on to say that there is still a lot of work to do before manufacturers and carriers are implementing security patches quickly. One last thing the head stated as an advantage over iOS was the fact that attacking a large number of users at once was becoming increasingly difficult on Android and something that is becoming less likely over time due to the different code that each manufacturer has implemented on their devices.
Over time Google is bound to take security more and more seriously and now that the company has launched its own line of smartphones, security flaws are bound to be more important to the companythan ever before in order to protect their customers and therefore their reputation, something that is especially important now due to the fact that the Pixel brand is still relatively unknown and can’t afford to be tainted by any security concerns.
