SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Your phone probably contains banking, payment and personal information that can be remotely stolen via numerous known and unknown bugs in the Android software. This is attractive to criminals.
Vendors (LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc.), after selling you their phone, have no incentive to keep your phone's software up to date with Google's fixes. Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.
In short, your phone could be hacked wide open from afar through a single innocent-looking email, MMS or web-page.
In the end the recommendations are: buy an Iphone, stick to Google phones or install a custom ROM.
Original URL: Android security in 2016 is a mess
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:41PM
Those recommendations have always applied. I'm baffled at so many people buying Samsung phones with their crappy history of patches. Great custom ROM availability though. Part of the problem as well I think is people don't mind having these phones that are never updated (OS version-wise) as there's almost never anything you can't do because of it. Pretty much every part can be placed because it's not locked down. Perhaps people would care more if features came out that couldn't be done by applications rather than the OS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:59PM
The vast majority of Android phone owners don't think about or care about system updates. The vast majority of iPhone users are nagged mercilessly until they install updates.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:26PM
What are you talking about? Many Android phones do indeed have a terrible reputation for never being updated, but my Galaxy S5 has gotten continuous updates, and it's a few years old now. The Galaxy S? line has been really good about updates. The problems are those cheap-o $50 Android phones.
(Score: 1) by ilsa on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:44PM
I made the decision to never use a Samsung mobile device again after having an S3. I eventually gave up and was forced to root it and install cyanogenmod just so my phone would be half-way usable.
The only reason they're even providing updates now (and even then I'm guessing only on a few of their devices, not their entire lineup) was because they were embarrassed into doing it.
This is why I stick with Apple devices now. Sure, they're a bunch of greedy, money-grabbing assholes, but at least they make an effort to keep their OS secure and stable, unlike Google nor every manufacturer that puts out Android devices.
(Also keep in mind that just because a device in the US gets an update, doesn't mind the exact same device in another country will. The likelyhood that this happens is very low.)