Google: Half of Android devices haven’t been patched in a year or more
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:41:00 -0700
Google engineers yesterday acknowledged that half of all Android devices had not received a security update in the past year, even as they argued that the firm has made progress in streamlining the open-source operating system’s patching process.
“About half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received a platform security update in the previous year,” Adrian Ludwig and Mel Mille, members of the Android security team, said in a post to a company blog.
Although Google has issued monthly security updates for Android since 2015 — and deploys those patches to Nexis and Pixel devices as soon as they’re available — other device makers often take weeks or months to push updates to customers, or never do. Android’s update problem is not new — it’s been in stark contrast to other operating systems, notably iOS, macOS and Windows, since Android’s inception — and is baked into the relationship between Google and the hardware manufacturers who build and sell phones.
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