Android Phones Most Vulnerable Due To Lack of Updates

A recent study highlights the fact that unlike other platform owners, Google has a really hard time making sure all the devices that run their Android operating system are secure, since the large number of versions and the freedom given to phone manufacturers and wireless carriers interferes too much in the highly necessary update processes.

Researchers from Bit9 point out the contrast between Google and Apple, which only has one operating system that has different versions, instead of six, each with it's own variants.

In addition, the fact that mobile device vendors and wireless carriers have a say on which version goes on which phone at which point, makes it very difficult and nearly impossible to make sure smartphone and tablet owners benefit from the latest updates and implicitly the latest security patches.

The report entitled The Most Vulnerable Smartphones of 2011 reveals that the top 12 weakest phones are Android models and while studies show that the numbers of Android targeting malware increase considerably in each quarter, this is highly worrying.

Among them, Samsung turned out to be the manufacturer that's the slowest when it comes to providing updates for their phones.

Researchers believe that all the tinkering made to the open-source operating system only causes problems, since in many cases a bug fix will only attract other problems.

Manufacturer's focus too much on developing new models instead of maintaining the current ones. We are faced with cases where phones are retired after a few months even though the contracts they're purchased with are signed for two years.

If the entire update process was left up to Google to handle, everything would go much smoother since they would have no problems releasing improved versions for their platform, but because each manufacturer practically makes it's own operating systems, Google can only stand, watch and in some cases advise.