[tim333]

Some recent figures: (http://betanews.com/2015/06/26/android-is-the-biggest-target...)

>"There was significant growth in Android malware, which currently consists of 97 percent of all mobile malware developed. In 2014 alone, there were 1,268 known families of Android malware, which is an increase of 464 from 2013 and 1,030 from 2012", it said.

Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, went through last year basically unscratched. The report said that there were just four iOS targeted attacks in 2014, and the majority of those were designed to infiltrate jailbroken devices.

[blinkingled]

I would not read too much into 'reports' by companies trying to sell you security products.

If you want to talk impacts - both iOS and Android have been similarly impacted - big name apps getting into App Store that were compiled by hacked XCode, Ad SDKs using forbidden APIs etc. Likewise most Android malware is due to rooting and side loading apps from questionable sources.

[tim333]

So Android getting about 100x as much malware as iOS is not significant? That's from all reporting I've seen, not just that one. Just because iOS has problems too doesn't make the numbers the same.

[blinkingled]

It would be significant if the statement was "There are 100x more infected Android phones than iOS phones."

Remember that Android is a lot of things - there are Nexus phones, there are OHA OEM phones (majority of them), there are Chinese no name phones that use open source Android etc. So if most Chinese people use AOSP build provided by their phone maker and they all sideload apps and get infected - that's different. Even considering all this nobody is making the above statement.

Just having malware written for an OS means nothing. It only suggest that it is targeted more due to market share. If people jailbreak their iPhones and install random apps from untrusted sources there is hardly anything Apple's security can do to prevent it. Same goes for Android. Nothing in that reflects the security of the underlying platform.

[lern_too_spel]

Orders of magnitude more iOS users have been infected by malware (via XcodeGhost) than Google-flavored Android users, despite the latter platform having multiple times more users. The reports you're pointing to list malware in Chinese app stores on non-Google-flavored devices.