Android apps seem to be more secure than ever

Android apps seem to be more secure than ever

Google's efforts for wider adoption of the HTTPS standard are paying off and now 80% of all Android apps are encrypting their default traffic. In a blog post, the search giant said that four out of five Android apps on the Google Play Store encrypted their network traffic using the HTTPS protocol, which means that data sent to and from the apps cannot be intercepted or read by third parties. Google also expects an increase in the number of apps using the HTTPS protocol in the coming years as a result of a series of measures released in 2016, such as warnings in IDE tools and the Google Play Developer Dashboard. This is one area where Google has been able to outperform Apple because the iPhone maker has had a hard time forcing its app developers to use the HTTPS protocol. In fact, according to a report published in June, only a third of iOS apps use ATS to encrypt their network traffic.

HTTPS adoption

In addition to getting Android app developers to use HTTPS, Google has also gotten websites to adopt the new standard, unlike HTTP, which is vulnerable to SQL injection as well as cross-site scripting. (XSS). The company's transparency report even shows that HTTPS usage in Google Chrome is currently between 85 and 95% depending on the platform. For example, 89% of all websites loaded in Chrome on Android now load over HTTPS, while on Chrome for Windows, that number is 84%. Mozilla has made similar progress, revealing in September that more than 80% of all web pages loaded in Firefox now load over HTTPS. via ZDNet