14 DAY TRIAL // The days when iPhones were considered the most secure smartphones in the world are long gone, and the plethora of hacks that made the rounds lately are the perfect explanation as to why this is no longer the case.
Google researchers, for example, recently revealed that iPhones have been exposed to hackers for years due to a vulnerability that allowed implants to compromise devices and provide attackers with access to pretty much everything on the smartphone. And that everything bit includes personal information from photos and messages to WhatsApp conversations and other logs.
What’s worse for Apple is that even companies that are in the business of selling zero-days to governments are affected by iPhone’s struggle in the security department.
Zerodium, one of the biggest names that sell Android and iPhone hacks, says exploits aimed at Apple’s devices are no longer worth as much as they were a few years ago, pretty much because too many people manage to find vulnerabilities in these devices.
As a result, Android exploits are more expensive than those for iPhones, which is a first since Apple brought its now-flagship product to the market back in 2007.
And all these iPhone security concerns that Apple doesn’t seem to be able to resolve makes me wonder once again what would have happened if Windows Phone was still alive.
It’s a well-known fact that every time one platform goes through such a bad time, users become more interested in a possible migration to an alternative operating system. While it’s long road from being interested in such a move to actually doing it, iPhone security woes making the rounds every once in a while definitely helps push more people towards the world of Android.
Windows Phone was considered at one point an alternative to Android and iOS, so it’s easy to imagine that Microsoft’s platform would have benefited from iPhone’s blunders.
Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile never had major security problems, albeit Microsoft did resolve important vulnerabilities as part of its Patch Tuesday rollouts. But nothing that gets close to the security bugs discovered by Google researchers and hitting iPhones.
From a security perspective, Windows phones have always been at the top of the industry. On the other hand, let’s be honest about it, this whole thing was closely related to the number of users in the Windows Phone world. The larger the userbase, the more attention an operating system receives, so Microsoft’s mobile platform never became an important target for hackers because only a handful of people was actually using it.
In other words, it wasn’t worth it, as exploits aimed at Windows phones would have only been aimed at a very limited number of targets.
Unfortunately, Microsoft eventually decided to kill its mobile platform altogether, so despite all these pros, the cons, with the lack of users being the most important, eventually convinced the software giant that investing in Windows phones wasn’t the right thing to do moving forward.
Windows phones are close to extinction at this point, and the very few devices still in use these days would only receive updates until December this year. These are the last months with Windows phones around, after which the world will officially be all about Android and iPhones.
The only thing we can hope is that both Google and Apple continue investments in the security of their platforms and devices, because without Windows Phone, we’re losing not only a mobile operating system, but also a big name that would have pushed the competition here in this mobile sector even further.