Google admits Android wasn’t designed to be safe

In the wake of numerous reports that all point to the same conclusion – that malware infestation is running amok on Android – the Internet giant made an unusually open statement through the mouth of its Android lead, Sundar Pichai, who finally admitted that Android wasn’t built for security.

“If I had a company dedicated to malware, I would also be targetting Android”, Pichai allegedly said to a stunned audience at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. When your own platform lead starts making such frank statements about Android security, it’s high time you considered taking these security reports at face value…

Here’s a machine-translated quote from the original in French, via FrAndroid:

We cannot guarantee that Android is designed to be safe as the platform was designed to give more freedom.

When people talk about 90 percet of malware on Android, they must of course take into account the fact that it’s the most used operating system in the world.

If I had a company dedicated to malware, I would also be targetting Android.

Actually, Android accounts for an unbelievable 98 percent of all new mobile threat detections, Kaspersky Lab said yesterday.

As Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber noted, Google has indeed become the new Microsoft.

The old Windows line of defense: Android is so popular of course it has all the malware. For some reason, though, that’s the only sort of software where Android leads iOS in third-party developer support.

For the sake of completeness, Google Chairman was ridiculed last October during a question-and-answer session at the Gartner Symposium over his stubborn insistence that Android is more secure than the iPhone.

Android’s susceptibility to malware is often ridiculed by the Apple camp and even Apple’s own executives aren’t immune to this. For example, Apple’s own marketing head, Phil Schiller, last March tweeted out a link pointing to a mobile security report criticizing Android’s lack of security.

While Android’s popularity does make it an attractive target for malware creators, there’s no denying the fact that, at its core, Android is less secure than iOS or Windows Phone for that matter. If it were the other way round, Android – not iOS – would dominate in large scale enterprise deployments.