What is Android ?

Android malware reported had come from the Google Play store.

In August 2015, Google announced that devices in the Google Nexus series would begin to receive monthly security patches

Google also wrote that

continue to receive major updates for at least two years

The following October, researchers at the University of Cambridge concluded that 87.7% of Android phones in use had known but unpatched security vulnerabilities due to lack of updates and support.

Android was originally designed, above all else, to be widely adopted.

Google was starting from scratch with zero percent market share

"instead we got a few updates on specific versions of a small handful of models. And a bunch of broken promises".

In a March 2017 post on Google's Security Blog,

Android security leads Adrian Ludwig and Mel Miller wrote that "More than 735 million devices from 200+

platform security update in 2016" and that "Our carrier and hardware partners helped expand deployment of these updates

over half of the top 50 devices worldwide in the last quarter of 2016".

They also wrote that "About half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received

Furthermore, in a comment to TechCrunch, Ludwig stated that the wait time for security updates had been reduced from "six to nine weeks down to just a few days", with 78% of flagship devices in North America being up-to-date on security at the end of 2016

However, the open-source nature of Android allows security contractors to take existing devices and adapt them for highly secure uses

For example, Samsung has worked with General Dynamics through their Open Kernel Labs acquisition to rebuild Jelly Bean on top of their hardened microvisor for the "Knox" project

Android smartphones have the ability to report the location of Wi-Fi access points, encountered as phone users move around, to build databases containing the physical locations of hundreds of millions of such access points.

Android smartphones have the ability to report the location of Wi-Fi access points, encountered as phone users move around, to build databases containing the physical locations of hundreds of millions of such access points.

Third party monitoring software such as TaintDroid

when personal information is being sent from applications to remote servers.[