Google's Android is equally secure as Apple's iOS and will even be more secure soon, according to Adrian Ludwig, director of security at Android, in an interview with Vice Magazine. "For almost all threat models they are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities," he added.
The recently released Google Pixel and the iPhone are pretty much identical when it comes to security, but Android will soon be better. "In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place," according to Ludwig.
During a conference about Android security he told the audience that Google scans 400 million Android devices and 6 billion apps every day. Due to these checks and other security measures less than 1% of Android phones is infected with malware, according to Ludwig.
He also mentioned that despite the attention for the Stagefright vulnerability in Android, Google still hasn't seen any attack on Android devices that abuses this leak. Ludwig did admit that telecom operators and device manufacturer should perform better when it comes to security updates.
"We got quite a bit of work left to do to get to a point where that actually happens on a regular basis across the whole the ecosystem," he said.
"Android is already secure enough that it’s almost impossible for someone to target a large number of people at the same time," Ludwig added, "mass exploitation is something that I’m not expecting that we’re going to see at any point in the Android ecosystem".
