Nokia and other Android smartphones now receiving updates faster, says a research firm
Nokia Mobile under Android One releases security updates for its smartphones in a month or so. And, for many, the security updates are boring (something like on Windows PC), but the security updates repair the security flaws and keep your device secure. As per the German cyber-security firm SRLabs, Nokia is doing exceptionally well in pushing the timely security updates to its smartphones.
Over the last 2 years, SRLabs collected details about security patches from thousands of Android devices, of which 10,000 builds date back to patches from 2018 and 7,000 builds date back to patches from 2019. They found that, Android OEMs pushed security updates about 15% faster in 2019, compared to the rate in 2018, with the average gap between consecutive security patches, decreasing from 44 to 38 days.
In the table seen above, patch delay is the difference between the build date and the patch release date. As expected, Google is in the first place, because of its less diverse portfolio which helps it release updates faster than any other Android OEM. Even Nokia released patches relatively faster and missed very less patches.
SRLabs reports that, OEMs tend to fix their most widely deployed Android versions faster than less-widely deployed versions. Some OEMs can fix their devices faster because, they either use stock Android or because, they have fewer devices in the market, which makes the patching process easier and faster for them. That is the case with Nokia and Sony, they receive the security updates from Google about a month before Google makes it public.
The graph above shows the patch delay for different Android versions on Nokia smartphones.
SRLabs concludes by saying that, though the patch delay has decreased, the Android ecosystem despite everything, has security challenges, because the less widespread Android versions end up missing the security updates.
Nokia is in a good spot with the updates, but Nokia Mobile still needs to speed up the delivery of the updates and maybe work on a launcher to diversify its software a bit. Z Launcher would be totally cool direction of software diversification.
