Google’s director of security at Android, Adrian Ludwig, wants mobile users to know that the Pixel and the iPhone are security equals.
In an interview with Motherboard after the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York, Ludwig stated that “For almost all threat models, they are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities.”
He also said that “for sure” the Pixel, the first ‘Made by Google’ phone, is as secure as Apple’s iPhone, adding that Android will soon exceed Apple’s level of security.
“In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place,” Ludwig told the publication.
During the conference, Ludwig noted that Android’s security product ‘Safety Net’ scans 400 million devices per day and checks six billion apps per day, resulting in less than one percent of Android smartphones containing malware.
He also brought up the infamous Android bug Stagefright, which made the news due to its large potential scope. In reality, Google has yet to see a real-life hack of its OS using Stagefright, according to Ludwig.
While extremely confident in his operating system’s security, the director did admit that the lag in security patch adoption by OEMs and carriers still had to be addressed.
“We got quite a bit of work left to do to get to a point where that actually happens on a regular basis across the whole the ecosystem,” said Ludwig.
Related: Rogers confirms Pixel updates will come straight from Google
[source]Motherboard[/source]
