CIA Leak Reveals Gaps in Patchwork of Android Software – WSJ (Mar 11, 2017)
The CIA leak taught us nothing new about the slow rate of Android adoption, but it did perhaps serve as a reminder of its consequences for security. Android adoption is notoriously slow, and it’s something I’ve written about quite bit (see here for my most recent deep dive into the numbers). It takes roughly two years on average for a new version of Android to reach 50% adoption among the base, and no version ever gets above about 40% adoption before a new version begins eating into its share. Compare that to iOS, which typically gets to about 70% adoption within a few months of release, and whose two most recent versions usually account for over 90% of the total base. In the past, this was very problematic, because it meant security vulnerabilities weren’t patched and users were left open to hacks and malware. However, more recently Google and its partners have separated some of the security patches from major OS updates and fast tracked these through a separate update process with the carriers. It’s not a universal solution, but it has helped mitigate some of the security impacts that result from slow OS updates. However, Android in general continues to be far more vulnerable to malware than iOS both because of the slow update issue and because of its overall architecture.
via WSJ
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