Exponential growth of Android - A challenge for security

Android from Google is the leading smartphone platform in the U.S today. The last report from ComScore claims 1 in 2 smartphone users are running Android. It powers about 250 million devices and is only growing at an exponential pace what with more than 700,000 activations per day. But, Android is a mix of more than a dozen different versions. Note that each of these versions supports different API levels to further complicate matters. This fragmentation is evident from the Version tracker below.

Source: ComScore

Source: Android

Does it mean each of these versions of Android is supported actively? Its debatable as this is what is quoted on the android developer faq page.

Android is a mobile platform that is released as open source and available for free use by anybody. This means that there are many Android-based products available to consumers, and most of them are created without the knowledge or participation of the Android Open Source Project. Like the maintainers of other open source projects, we cannot build and release patches for the entire ecosystem of products using Android. Instead, we will work diligently to find and fix flaws as quickly as possible and to distribute those fixes to the manufacturers of the products through the open source project.

The key phrase is "we cannot build and release patches for the entire ecosystem of products using Android."  This poses a risk in my opinion. Security threats on Android can only proliferate in this scenario. In fact, the MobileThreatReport from F-Secure claims the number of unique malware on Android has more than quadrupled in the last year.

Source: ZDNet