The enterprise world continues its massive shift to mobile devices running Android, further accelerated by Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows Mobile. As a result, IT professionals in the enterprise may wonder how Android is doing with security… is this OS ready for the prime time into which it has been thrust?

Google has stepped forward with a detailed and fact-rich free report, Android Security – 2017 Year In Review, which provides an excellent overview of the progress made with security, as well as many fascinating metrics. Did you know that in 2017, downloading a PHA (potentially harmful application) from Google Play was less likely than the odds of an asteroid hitting the earth?

Click to download the free Android Security report

Consider these several data points drawn from the report:

• With more than 2 billion Android devices in use, Google Play Protect is the most widely deployed mobile threat protection service in the world. Android devices that only download apps
  from Google Play are 9 times less likely to get a PHA than devices that download apps from other sources.
• Managed Google Play is a curated Google Play store for enterprise customers. In 2017, the number of 30-day active devices running managed Google Play increased by 2000%.
• Google’s machine learning models successfully detected 60.3% of PHAs identified by Google Play Protect in 2017.
• Android platform security has been enhanced. Project Treble separates the general Android OS framework from vendor implementations… improving security while making it much easier to update devices to new versions of Android.
• In 2017, 0.56% of all Android devices scanned by Google Play Protect had installed a PHA, compared to 0.77% in 2016.