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 Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.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: 1) by Francis on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:16AM
I used to love Cyanogenmod on my Nexus One years back, it's a shame they changed their model. I'd consider paying for their firmware, but last I checked they didn't even support any of the devices I own, so nothing to pay for.
I personally think that by law companies ought to be required to offer the endusers some way of temporarily, or permanently, rooting their devices in order to remove bundled software. I like the idea of being able to root my device when I need that functionality and then turn it off as soon as I'm done with it. I don't know of any of the manufacturers offering that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:05AM
"There should be a law!"