Google: Half of Android devices haven’t been patched in a year or more

Google engineers yesterday acknowledged that half of all Android devices had not received a security update in the past year, even as they argued that the firm has made progress in streamlining the open-source operating system's patching process.

"About half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received a platform security update in the previous year," Adrian Ludwig and Mel Mille, members of the Android security team, said in a post to a company blog.

Although Google has issued monthly security updates for Android since 2015 -- and deploys those patches to Nexis and Pixel devices as soon as they're available -- other device makers often take weeks or months to push updates to customers, or never do. Android's update problem is not new -- it's been in stark contrast to other operating systems, notably iOS, macOS and Windows, since Android's inception -- and is baked into the relationship between Google and the hardware manufacturers who build and sell phones.

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