A researcher conducted an experiment to see which platform is safer: iOS or Android. Which one won?
An experiment conducted by Cybernews journalist Ernestas Naprys (via TechRadar) was done to see which platform is more secure, iOS or Android. Cybernews writes about cybersecurity issues and Naprys installed the top 100 apps from the German App Store and Play Store on a factory reset iPhone SE and a factory reset Android phone respectively. He then left the phones idle while he checked to see how often they contacted foreign servers and where those servers were located.While iOS on average queried 42% more external servers than Android, fans of the latter platform should not celebrate
During the five days that the iPhone was left alone, Naprys said that he «traced every outgoing connection the iPhone made to external servers.» He computed that Apple’s handset sent out on average 3,308 queries per day compared to the 2,323 daily queries that were sent out on average for the Android handset over the three days it was left idle. But if you’re pulling for Android in this two-horse race and think that it is a winner, you are premature. Cybernews said, «Compared to the experiment with Android, the iPhone’s query numbers for unfriendly countries are low.»
60% of iOS outgoing requests to connect were sent to Apple servers
It turns out that 60% of the outgoing requests made by the iPhone were sent to Apple as part of standard operating procedures. Only 24% of the requests made by the Android phone were sent to Google with the rest sent to third-party apps. For example, while the iPhone contacted a Russian server belonging to Chinese tech company Alibaba once a day on average, the Android device pinged a server in Russia 13 times as often pushing out 39 queries over a three-day period.
