[mike_hearn]

> it appears as if they get paid (or are forced to) not fix it

Occam's Razor says ... perhaps they believe 99.9% of people do not care and are not capable of understanding which encryption standard is being used to communicate with their base station, and thus Google prefers to focus its efforts on things that 99.9% of people would consider when buying a phone?

[slashdotaccount]

I don't think so. As a matter of fact, the Issue of not having a ciphering indicator within Android has been filed on December 10, 2009! But see for yourself: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5353