Google OS growth slows down, new evidence shows Android phones easily hacked

Google is best known for being proud of its Android achievements. The company has always reported about how many activations its OS saw including shipments. However, it appears the tides are changing as it has been a while since the numbers have been announced. More importantly, new issues about growth decline and hack vulnerabilities have started to hound Android. Can the OS get back up?

In a report by BGR, the publication highlights the lack of Android statistics. Further, the report claims that Android growth may be falling behind because there are a limited number of Android users left to attract. In the past summer, Google estimated around 1 billion active Android users monthly. This is an impressive figure but may be challenging to trump. This supports IDC's report claiming the Android smartphone growth can be on the decline this year:

"As reported earlier in May, smartphone shipments in China actually declined year over year in the first quarter of 2015, showing that the largest market in the world has reached a level of maturity where rapid growth will be harder to achieve. This has implications for Android because China has been a critical market for Android smartphone shipments in recent years, accounting for 36% of total volume in 2014."

Further challenges appear to crop up to Android's growth as a recent finding from Zimperium zLabs suggests that Android phones are at risk of hacking even through mere texts. Lead researcher Joshua Drake explains to Forbes: “I’ve done a lot of testing on an Ice Cream Sandwich Galaxy Nexus… where the default MMS is the messaging application Messenger. That one does not trigger automatically but if you look at the MMS, it triggers, you don’t have to try to play the media or anything, you just have to look at it."

He also says that manufacturers and carriers have not rolled out any solution. All devices remain vulnerable.

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