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Technology: More than One Billion+ Devices Run an Android Version 2+ Years out of Date

By Dick Weisinger

Android is the biggest competitor to Apple’s IPhones and operating system, but it has a big problem: few Android phone owners keep current with new releases of the Android operating system. While Google boasts more than 2 billion devices running Android, less than half of them are running with a version of the OS that was released within the last two years.

The problem is that, unlike Apple’s pro-active push for upgrades to the latest OS, manufacturers of Android phones have little incentive to provide quality support and to provide frequent OS upgrades. Vendors are primarily interested in selling new phones, not in supporting and keeping users satisfied with the phones that they sold in the past.

A major concern is that devices running older version of the OS are vulnerable to hacking.

Steve Santorelli, director at Team Cymru, said that “there is still code on old phones, and it may have been effectively abandoned and therefore unpatched. We’re still seeing newly discovered issues that have actually been around for many years, but only just discovered by researchers.”

 

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