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 Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:28AM
Its damned nice and the first mobile OS I've seen that bring you all the goodness of a general purpose PC in your pocket.
Large screen, great keyboard?
Don't like any app that comes with the phone, including the base apps? Just hold your finger on it and choose uninstall, that's it.
Yeah, that's the easy part.
Want to replace the default apps with third party like you do on the desktop? Go right ahead, nothing stopping you, just install what you want and toss what you don't.
If you like "desktop apps", sure. Otherwise, you quickly realize that you have on email app to choose from (and it's locked to outlook.com), one browser (Internet Explorer)...
That's the reason I spent two years trying to give away my Windows tablet: No mail app that works without an outlook.com account, and the best browser was IE. Not because IE mobile is better than IE desktop, but because the only alternative is Firefox 28 which was cancelled because "two few users", even though it's too buggy to use.