Novelist Umberto Eco wrote a deliciously insightful essay in 1994, in which he argued that the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine, in contrast to the PC, which, he argued, was clearly a Protestant device. How so? Simply this: the Mac freed its users (believers) from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to follow the Apple way. When the Mac was launched, for example, a vigorous debate broke out among user-interface geeks about whether a computer mouse should have one or two buttons. Some were critical of the fact that the Macintosh mouse had only one button. When queried about this, Steve Jobs — then, as later, the supreme pontiff of the church of Apple — was adamant and unrepentant. Two buttons would undermine the rationale of the Mac user interface. He spoke — as his Vatican counterpart still does — ex cathedra, and that was that.
In contrast, Eco pointed out, the poor wretches who used a PC had — like the Calvinists of yore — to make their own salvation. For them, there was no one true way. Instead they had to choose and install their own expansion cards and anti-virus software, wrestle with incompatible peripherals and so on. They were condemned to an endless round of decisions about matters that were incomprehensible to them, but on which their computational happiness depended.
Spool forward 21 years to today and nothing much has changed, other than that the chasm between computational Catholics and Protestants now applies to handheld computers called smartphones, rather than to the desktop machines of yore.
Today’s “Catholics” have iPhones running the Apple iOS operating system, while the “Calvinists” have devices made by a host of manufacturers and powered by various flavors of the Android operating system. And when the Catholics put their devices on to charge overnight, they wake up in the morning to find that Apple has downloaded yet another update.
For Android worshipers, the picture is mixed. Their fate largely depends on how conscientious the manufacturer of their device is about keeping them up to date and safe from security vulnerabilities. Some, such as Google and LG, are pretty good. Some, like Motorola, Samsung, Sony, HTC and ASUS, are moderately conscientious. And the rest are, frankly, disgraceful. They just make cheap phones, install a version of Android on them and leave users to their fate.
The result is a world in which millions of people connect to the Internet using phones that are riddled with security holes. A glance at the number of red flags on the IT Security Database of Android vulnerabilities confirms that, but we did not really have finer-grain information on the extent of the problem — until now.
On Oct. 8, researchers at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory published a sobering report suggesting that 87 percent of Android devices are insecure. These devices, the researchers say, are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps and messages.
The researchers also finger the culprits — smartphone manufacturers, most of which “do not provide regular security updates.”
“Some manufacturers are much better than others: the study shows that devices built by LG and Motorola, as well as those devices shipped under the Google Nexus brand, are much better than most,” they said.
Why does this matter? At the moment, most smartphones run on versions of the Android operating system and account for 81 percent of the global market. In part, the Android security problem is an outcome of the economics of that marketplace. Although the iPhone has only one-fifth of the smartphone market worldwide, it accounts for almost all of the profits generated by smartphone sales, because Apple’s margins on its phones are — to use a classic Silicon Valley adjective — insane.
Manufacturers of Android phones, in contrast, operate in a parallel universe in which cut-throat competition and infinitesimal profit margins are the norm.
One source claims, for example, that “LG makes just a penny in profit per device — and established players like HTC are imploding, while dirt-cheap Android handset manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi are enjoying stratospheric rises.”
What is happening, in other words, is that even the smartphone — which, however you look at it, is a fantastically intricate device — is being commoditized, reduced to a low-margin product that is stamped out by the billion. This is the iron law of electronics manufacturing: there is no money in hardware.
The most remarkable thing about the iPhone, in a way, is that it has escaped that fate. Maybe there is someone up there intervening on its behalf.
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