Though Google has included encryption on its line of Nexus smartphone, other handset manufacturers have stymied the company’s efforts to bring encryption to all Android devices, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Unlike Apple, which controls all technological elements of its iPhones, the report said Google distributes its Android software to manufacturers who are essentially free to do what they wish with the platform. Some handset makers, concerned with encryption’s impact on device performance, have declined to encrypt their devices.
As a result, the report found, encryption on iOS devices has hugely outpaced the use of the same on Android.
According to figures obtained by the Wall Street Journal, 95 percent of Apple devices are running a version of iOS that requires encryption.
By contrast, only two percent of Android users – those on the new Marshmallow platform – are using a version of the operating system (OS) that requires encryption. Though encryption is also available on earlier versions and on Google’s Nexus devices, less than 10 percent of Android phones are estimated to use encryption, according to the report.
Samsung has included encryption on the new Galaxy S7 smartphone and device makers LG and HTC have said most of their phones release this year will be encrypted, the report said.
Magnification
But Android to Apple is not – for lack of a better phrase – an apples to apples comparison.
Android’s slack encryption figures are compounded by two factors: Android’s dominant global market share and the slow adoption of the new Android Marshmallow platform, which requires encryption.
Though the Apple brand held the dominant market share position in the United States in 2015, figures from Kantar Worldpanel show iOS (with 39.1 percent market share) lagged nearly 20 percentage points behind Android (with 58.2 percent market share) as the most used OS in the country as of January 2016. In China, figures show the OS market share disparity is even greater, with Android devices accounting for nearly 74 percent of the market share to Apple’s 25 percent.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, the world is currently home to 1.4 billion Android devices, with over 4,000 models produced by more than 400 manufacturers.
Additionally, while Apple users have been quick to adopt the company’s encryption-protected iOS 9 – which is now used on nearly 80 percent of devices – installations of Android’s Marshmallow platform have plodded along at a much slower pace. As of March 7, Android reported only 2.3 percent of devices were running the latest version of the OS.
In 2016, International Data Corporation has forecast nearly 1.3 billion Android devices will be shipped worldwide, compared to just 231 million iOS devices. Even with encryption on select higher-end devices and phones running the Marshmallow OS that means a whole lot more devices without encryption will be circulating than those with the feature.
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