In a tradition Google started last year, it has now made its annual report on the issue of how well Android security is performing. And just as we had for last year,there are off course some eye-popping headlines this time around.
Can you believe Google scans about 6 billion Android Apps Everyday?
Google made the amazing revelations that it performs scans on about six billion Android apps on a daily basis on smartphones globally; for the purpose of locating mischievous apps (otherwise referred to officially by Google as Potentially Harmful Apps abbreviated PHAs). The company further disclosed that part of this scan include carrying out scans of about 400 million devices every day. Although there is no much certainty that these published number of scans involve automated scans, or probably those personally carried out by the user or even both.
On a general scale though, the security situation for Android devices is not too disturbing or out or place either. Google announced that as we cruise deeper into the year, there was the installation of PHAs in about 0.14% or less devices which were directly gotten from Google Play. In the event when you extend this to every android device making use of the services of Google, (not excluding apps which are gotten through third-party app stores), this figure would climb to 0.5%. In 2015, Google had announced that this figure was “less than one percent.”
Still I don’t really see any noticeable changes in the general chances of an Android user installing a dodgy app. Though we can’t say Google has been slack in the dimension of introducing new security features to properly combat with other kinds of threats. This fresh announcement draw emphasis on the amount of add-ons we had in 2015 most particularly the full disk encryption, a needed feature on “most Marshmallow devices.” Last June, Android was added to Google’s rewards program for technical experts who locate bugs, reporting that it has addressed about 100 bugs doling out monetary rewards exceeding $200,000 to researchers tracing them as well.
