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Comment by kingnothing | Hacker News Reader

Why do we only hear stories like this about Apple and the iPhone? How secure is Android? Is Google taking the same approach to protecting their users?

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>Why do we only hear stories like this about Apple and the iPhone? How secure is Android?

When the story broke in 2016, only about 10% of Android phones were encrypted vs about 95% of iPhones.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/why-are-so-few-andro...

At that time, Apple had included dedicated hardware in their SOC to handle device encryption for several generations, but enabling a software implementation of device encryption on Android caused performance penalties.

>there's a very significant performance penalty that comes with enabling FDE, with a 62.9% drop in random read performance, a 50.5% drop in random write performance, and a staggering 80.7% drop in sequential read performance.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8725/encryption-and-storage-p...

Google is definitely starting to take security more seriously with the Pixel: https://www.blog.google/products/android-enterprise/how-pixe...

I’d argue they, as a company, always took security pretty seriously, but never privacy.

FDE was pretty late and performed slow on early Android, among other issues.

I would say Google has always taken the security on the Pixel very seriously. It's also the reason why the Pixel phone was unhackable at Pwn2Own 2017 while the Chinese teams had their way with the iPhone.

You hear about Android security problems all the time. There just isn't a single open (now fixed) flaw like this on Android to write about. There are surely specific hacks for individual devices, and those probably get covered, but not as "Android" things.

Apple is working into the AR space where privacy matters and they're working into that image for their brand.

The structure of Apple's revenue sources makes it a sure fire bet to do vs Google.

What about AR makes privacy matter? Apple has kept the same policy on privacy since way before it meddled in AR (and realistically almost no one uses AR, it’s photos/messages that people want private).

Using AR would mean everything you do is recorded to some extent even though every effort is made to secure it. For instance to make queries on what you're seeing.

If everything you do in your daily life is recorded that is a significant privacy issue. More so than your private photos/text messages and GPS coordinates alone.

Apple is working on AR glasses, and is significantly promoting AR SDKs with their newest iOS releases. It's very easy to see why they take this privacy stance today.

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