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 Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.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 Thexalon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:03PM
This whole issue seems strangely familiar [soylentnews.org], as if we'd just discussed it last week or something.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.