Can Google really beat Apple at its own game?
Apple’s security and privacy are still seen as huge differentiators between iPhone and Android—but the surprising number of radical updates Google has just revealed could narrow that gap. Is Google really about to beat Apple at its own game ahead of its iPhone 16 and iOS 18 launch this fall?
Google had a mountain to climb to address Android’s security issues—and few expected it to realistically narrow the gap with iPhone. But it’s doing an impressively good job of exactly that. It has been helped in part by Apple’s DMA-prompted changes, but in the main it has done all the hard yards itself.
Not to say it has all been plain sailing—this week’s privacy backlash over AI call monitoring to flag scams in real time is a case in point. But Android is now a significantly more secure proposition than it has ever been. And some of Google’s upcoming innovations go beyond what even iPhone can do.
For Android to focus this heavily on security and privacy is a major surprise—we have not seen anything like this before from Google, and it shows just how its battle with iPhone is narrowing down.
Take “advanced cellular security,” for example. This pushes IMSI-grabbing and intercept detection to a new level for mainstream devices. If a phone drops down to a lesser than expected level of network encryption, perhaps signaling it has connected to a spoofed base station, then users will be warned. Similarly, if a network pings for device identifiers more than expected, users will also be warned—that could also be a precursor to location tracking or even an intercept attempt.
I covered the implications of these new advances here. Suffice to say it’s a huge step forwards for those likely to come up against low to medium sophistication levels of tracking—dissidents, journalists, activists.
