Google's 'open' Android doesn't make it less secure, says OS head

Google's senior vice president, overlooking Android, has reportedly said that his statement that Android 'not designed to be safe, but to be open,' doesn't mean that the OS is insecure.

Sundar Pichai, clarifying his remark at the Mobile World Congress, explained that Android's openness makes it more secure and not less, because it undergoes a lot of scrutiny.

According to Tech Crunch, Pichai said that open platforms historically undergo a lot of scrutiny, but there are a lot of advantages to having an open source platform from a security standpoint.

He further argued that it's the best way for a platform to be secure, because every researcher in the world could inspect it, every developer in the world could inspect it, and that contributes a lot to Android security.

This comes after a local site quoted Pichai as indicating that Google's Android operating system was not designed to be secure, stirring doubts.

Pichai said that Android was built to be very secure and because of its openness, many people could ship it in many different ways and there are security vulnerabilities when some partners ship devices having an older version of Android.

On research results that about 99.8 percent of mobile malware targets Android, Pichai said that malware targets where users are, but what matters more is that if someone uses Android that doesn't make them fundamentally compromised, the report added.