Google Scans 6B Apps, 400M Devices Each Day; Says 30% of Android Devices Don't Get Regular Patches (googleblog.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @07:20AM from the state-of-Android dept.

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: As part of the enhancements to Android security, Google scans more than 6 billion installed applications per day on users' devices. The company also scans more than 400 million devices each day, it announced on Tuesday. Google last year also began releasing monthly security updates for devices running modern versions of Android, which includes devices on version 4.4.4 (KitKat) and later. "70.8% of all active Android devices are on a version that we support with patches," the Android report says. However, that still leaves hundreds of millions of Android devices without regular updates. There were roughly 1.4 billion Android devices active in September, according to Google, so that would leave about 420 million Android devices without patches. In the Android ecosystem, carriers are also responsible for pushing security patches to users, so while Google pushes security updates each month, not all carriers and device manufacturers release them to all users regularly.In its report, Google also says that fewer than 0.15% of devices, that only get apps from Google Play, had potentially harmful apps installed on them.

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Re:Do I really need to point out the fix? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-04-19 07:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

No money in that. It's why cell providers are trying to avoid selling WinPhones, without forced obsolescence a big part of the cell provider income stream goes away. They don't want to relay patches at any speed, they want customers to sign new 2-year contracts every two years, get a new phone running a modern build, and recycle the old one for raw materials (especially if the only problem with the old one is an obsolete OS version).
Remove Android's big advantage to the cell providers and watch them go back to pushing proprietary software like they did before Google's lax oversight unified their business plans.
Apple gets around this by having a very devoted fan base. They don't want "a good phone" they want "this month's iPhone," and AT&T gives in to the demand.