I track security patch counts of monthly Android Security Bulletin vs available APEX vs my aftermarket backports for A7 through A13 here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_counts#aggregatePatchCounts
I recently tried an Android phone again for a few months, and the update/security situation is still a mess. E.g. Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones. But a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only get the update near the end of the month, even before the S24 is out. Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of a month is… meh.
For some vendors, like Samsung, things are much better than a decade ago, but it’s still a far cry from Apple rolling out updates to all models simultaneously.
Out of curiosity , have you ever encountered any malware that exploits said CVEs? If a month delay would be so dangerous, Android users, even of new devices would be getting pwned left and right, let alone Android users of device no longer getting patches.
Source: Android user of old phone who hasn't been hacked yet so I'm not sure where exactly the dangers are, as the attack surface is mostly the web browser and the apps, both of which are scanned and covered by up-to-date patches from Google Play Store/Services even on my ageing phone. So as long as you don't browse extremely dodgy websites, and don't download shady apps you should be good as nothing else can't get to the Kernel CVEs on your unpatched phone.
Yeah, I'm sure some crafty malware dev can whip out a targeted virus that can exploit the chain of open CVEs on my particular phone through a MMS message or something, but I'm not sure targeting the 100 or so users left still using this old OnePlus model that's worth less than 20 Euros used (pointing to a user without much income), is a good use of their skills and time, when they could be frying much bigger fish with that know-how like going after Microsoft's Azure or something.
Nor am I being targeted by state actors who have these means. And if you are being targeted by state actors, they have access Zero-Days that even Apple or Google haven't patched yet so you're not safe anyway no matter what phone you have.
What are the odds that you'd ever know if you were hacked? If you have root access on your device your odds of being able to see something amiss are probably somewhat better than if you don't, but even then I wouldn't count on it. How many people detected Predator/Pegasus? It isn't just state actors taking advantage of zero days. A zero day gets that malware on your system, but once it's infected how would you know? There have been reports that millions of android phones are infected at the factory. (https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/11/bh_asia_mobile_phones...)
We know mass infections happen (see https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-nine-mil... and https://www.wired.com/story/android-gooligan-ghost-push-hack... and there have been some bold (if unverified) claims that most android devices are/were infected with something (https://www.zdnet.com/article/bt-almost-every-android-device...).
I don't know how you could possibly be confident that your device isn't infected with something. The devices are designed to keep you from having the ability to poke around too much at their internals and the radios make it difficult to monitor exactly what's being sent/received to the device.
Would you know?
>I don't know how you could possibly be confident that your device isn't infected with something.
Easy, my bank account is still full.
How are you confident your phone isn't infected? Being up to date is no guarantee. Until you can poke around with root access to inspect everything it's still Schrodinger's cat in a black box you trust to not be dead inside.
Because how would malware ever make it into my phone? It doesn't just magic itself onto your device once it stops received updates. It needs an entry point off the attack surface. And what's my attack surface since all your examples don't apply to me?
I never download shady Apps from the likes of Huawei AppGallery lol or even off the PlayStore and I don't use Android 5. All apps I use are whatsapp and Google chrome, and I also don't browse shady websites on my phone.
I very much doubt it.
> Easy, my bank account is still full.
That assumes the malware is intended to take your money instead of your data, or even just your internet connection. Malware can be used to attack/infect other devices or even just click ads. What kind of harm could someone who had full access to your device, including access to your internet activity, texts, location, camera, and microphone do to you without telling you about it (blackmail).
> Because how would malware ever make it into my phone?
Maybe it was installed at the factory. Maybe it came from literally any one of the many many vulnerabilities that made it possible to infect your device without any indication. Android phones have been compromised via text message, via Bluetooth, via QR code, and via apps.
It's great that you aren't doing anything obviously risky, but that isn't a requirement to get infected and the problem is you just can't know. You aren't the admin of the device. You don't have the authority to control what it does. You aren't allowed to see what it's doing. You can't see who it's communicating with or when.
Your average Joe six-pack like myself probably shouldn't really worry about it though, it seems more likely to be used against really high value targets.
You might want to try out another web browser that has aggressive ad blocking (Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi should do it) since ads are one of the major methods of spreading malware.
Under rated advise. Too bad said Joe six-pack donesn't follow it because it thinks other browsers "have viruses"
To be fair, it's non-trivial to convert hacked bank credentials to actual cash, due to anti-fraud measures, KYC rules, and reversibility built into the finance system. A better indicator would be $1000 worth of BTC on an unencrypted wallet not being hacked.
Considering how many vulnerabilities have been in the media stack of Android, all that would take would be an image or an autoplay video on a website.
FWIW, while I don't think I personally had an Android device hacked, I do think I've had family members with devices potentially hacked. One family member running an older version of Android continued to have lots of accounts constantly getting stolen despite using a password manager and unique complicated passwords. Pretty much any time they'd be logged in to an app there would begin to be fraudulent orders or other mischief on that service. They never installed shady apps. Rotate the password on another device, no problems for a while. Log in on the phone again and within a day or two have the mischief start again. All that stopped after replacing the device.
Another family member started getting popover ads on their device despite not having any odd apps installed that would be the cause. Even after a "factory reset" the popover ads continued to plague the device, as if it was embedded in the ROM.
That one is probably not valid.
My bank app is sht, The 2FA is EMBEDED in the app; in the beggining it was a separate app. It also needs Google Play Services. And I live in a third world country with little accountabilty. On top of all that, most people use very cheap chinese phones which never get any update.
Still, bank accounts have never been depleted through hacking of phones.
This is complicated by their rolling updates per country, it can be few weeks between the first CSC (3 letter identifier for country and carrier variant) to receive an update and it being rolled out to the final one.
I was towards the end of that update cycle, so the Android security patch level could become quite detached from the actual month.
If something is actively exploited they definitely don't wait to months end. Also a Google update is not urgent if the vulnerability is not really exploitable on Samsung (they have some additional security) or a fix is already backported.
More recent versions of apps (like whatsapp, which requires to be updated regularly) are unnecessarily more demanding. Try disabling Play services, all Bloatware, all quasi-bloatware (calendar, contacts), all the way to the default keyboard. (pm disable-user --user 0)
Install FOS replacements with no internet connectivity, e.g. from f-droid and such (not affiliated)
It is easier to buy a new device, but I get attached to my pal ;)
Has Android gotten that bad? I last used it in 2018, and haven't exactly missed it since, but even back then I didn't think of Calendar or Contacts as quasi-bloatware.
In the best case when a page write fails the memory controller discards the page from the pool, when the pool becomes exactly equal to the official size the device goes into permanent read-only mode. (Which would brick any device it's built into. A PC you could pop in another drive, a phone you can't.) Many devices have failure modes worse than this.
The better the quality of the memory the more margin it has, and how much you write to a drive has little to do with how big it is--from a practical standpoint life expectancy is roughly linear with size.
For the flash itself (the giant mass of NAND or NOR gates making up the cells), in terms of TBW it's straight up linear with size. 2 TB flash storage has twice as many cells as a 1 TB (of the same make) therefore can eat twice as many write cycles (unless the manufacturer does something on the sly like change overprovision ratio based on capacity, change from TLC to QLC on higher capacity units and "forget" to mention it, etc., but those are factors beyond the basic logic gate arrays).
However I don't think size effects MTBF as that looks at factors unrelated to write cycles; things like catastrophic failure of a chip or a short that catches fire and burns down the server farm.
Realistically speaking, MTBF has little bearing when considering flash storage lifetime. TBW is where it's at. If the specs only give MTBF, I tend to assume the TBW is bad enough it's worth hiding and I'll avoid those . If not that, then it's either straight incompetence, recycled flash scam, or the manufacturer just doesn't give a shit (all of which are way worse than choosing to omit a low TBW rating).
It may seem like i'm nitpicking the word 'roughly' but i don't disagree with the sentiment. Depending on how you want to measure lifetime (jfc don't use MTBF), it isn't exactly linear, but it's not the flash's fault.
Apple is only supporting latest version of iOS (17.5).
1. Your point still stands, but this is because this update is probably shipping as a Google Play Framework update, which works on >= 6.0. Google is not (to my knowledge) releasing a new firmware.
Apple would do well to decouple certain software components from iOS, IMHO.
2. In case others are curious about iOS version market share, statcounter's stats for April 2024:
17.4 (current until today): 51%
17.3: 22%
16.6: 4.3%
16.7: 3.18%
16.1: 2.8%
16.3: 2.12%
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobil...
Our Android app shipped almost 3 years ago with minSdk=24 (Android 6.0) and we haven't had to update it.
We, to this day...with no talks of changing it any time soon, support all the way back to Android 5.0 (released in November on 2014).
Goes back to 3.1
Still a big win overall I’m just curious what number of devices basically don’t get important upgrades due to this method. (Surely a tiny amount compared to what you’d have if you relied on device manufacturers to update the OS.)
I'm not really convinced of this. When you control the entire hardware and software stack, and already provide updates for 7+(?) years per model, would doing this really change much? Google needed to do that because some cheapo manufacturers weren't really providing any updates to speak of, and Google has limited ability to force manufacturers to provide updates on any particular schedule.
It's funny, because to me this is really just the Linux model vs. BSD model, in a way. Linux base systems are cobbled together from various bits of software maintained by different people and groups. Many of those components can be updated independently of one another, including the kernel. The BSD model is to ship the entire base system as a versioned unit, and only update the entire thing monolithically. Android does the Linux model, iOS does the BSD model. Both models work just fine, depending on what your goals are and your distribution model.
I think the one thing I'd argue Apple should decouple from the OS is Safari. A web browser (and the underlying OS web view) should be independently updateable, even after a device stops getting OS-level security updates.
Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five years of OS updates, with additional years of security updates after that.
For instance, the original version of the iPhone SE is currently in its eighth year of support, and just got another security update a couple of weeks ago.
For instance, that original iPhone SE came out in 2016, the same year as the original Pixel phone. The iPhone is still supported by Apple today, while the Pixel phone was dropped from support by Google five years ago.
Google had to come up with a way to backport features to older unsupported versions of the OS because their support window was so abysmally short.
Hopefully, this won't be an issue going forward, with Google promising a comparable support window in the future.
On Android, the browser is separate and you can install alternative browsers. The current release of Chrome for Android works with Android 8 which was released in August 21, 2017 and dropped January 2021. Android System Webview (the browser engine that other apps can use so they don't have to ship their own) works the same way and is independently updated from the OS.
> Virtually any Android, Linux, or Windows device that hasn't been recently patched and has Bluetooth turned on can be compromised by an attacking device within 32 feet. It doesn't require device users to click on any links, connect to a rogue Bluetooth device, or take any other action, short of leaving Bluetooth on. The exploit process is generally very fast, requiring no more than 10 seconds to complete
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/bluet...
A browser update doesn't fix that and that and Blueborne was disclosed during the era when an Android device only had a support window of two of three years.
iPhones from over a decade ago were getting security updates, including for the browser, for seven or eight years.
Every month or so someone (usually a security company that wants to sell something) find a domesday exploit for android that is unpatchable, and then it gets patched or turns out to be a non issue.
Internet Explorer was usually only loosely tied to the OS. Yes, many versions of Windows came with some version of IE, but you could usually install a newer version if you wanted. Every once in a while, a newer version of IE required a newer version of Windows, but that wasn't typical.
As I understand it, on Apple systems, Safari comes with the OS and is updated together --- Safari updates come in OS updates. Mobile IE was very similar though, at least on Windows Phone 7 and newer.
That’s true on iOS but not exactly true on macOS. Upgrading macOS also upgrades Safari, but you can also install newer versions of Safari on older versions of macOS. You just can’t have older versions of Safari on newer versions of macOS.
iOS 17 runs on 80% of current iPhones in use
https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-03-24/#:~:te....
https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-country#p...
A lot of the early Fire TV devices are still out there running Android 5.0, and they are actively used.
I reckon the WhatsApp userbase OS distribution skews much more to older android versions compared to an app that mostly enjoys US/1st world country userbase.
With the number of Android devices out there, it really makes more sense to think about it in actual user/device count rather than percentages.
Sure, you can often install a modern Linux distro on a 20-year-old device (though just as often, you cannot), but that's not the same thing as a single version of Windows being supported for 10 years. The analogous situation is indeed LTS versions of Linux distros, which certainly don't have 10-year support lifetimes, let alone 20.
But the support lifetimes make sense for the various vendors. Apple doesn't need to support a particular major version of macOS or iOS for all that long, because they make sure new versions of their OSes will run on fairly old devices (all of which are devices they've built, and have full control over), and they aggressively push people to upgrade to new major versions as they come out.
Microsoft has a lot of customers who value stability and consistency above all else, and on top of that, they have to support a wide variety of hardware that they don't and can't control. Supporting a major version of Windows for many years makes sense for them.
As for Linux, there's no one single source, so a rolling-release distro can decide to only support the bleeding edge, whereas a cloud provider might roll their own distro for server use and decide to support that for a decade, if they think that's what their customers want.
Just that Android devices are not involved in tracking of AirTags, as of today only iOS devices actually share the location of AirTags back to Apple.
They maybe want to change that, but considering the huge amount of volume disparity between AirTags and Google's tags, I assume Apple would have to pay Google for the service of extending their tracking-network...
Or for contractual reasons, or for some technical reason it was easy enough to be "why not"