Security News > 2020 > April > Android Phone Makers Improve Patching Practices
The Android ecosystem continues to become more fragmented: several Android versions are supported at the same time, and unsupported end-of-life versions continue to be widely used.
Only 30% of the observed devices were running Android 9 or newer in 2019, 40% were running Android 8, and 30% were running Android 7.
"Overall, we find that vendors tend to patch their most widely deployed Android versions faster than less-widely deployed versions. Less widely deployed versions, even if more recent, were more likely to see delayed updates or missed patches," the security firm says.
Vendors such as Nokia and Google deliver patches exceptionally fast, with newer Android versions built days or even weeks before the public Android Security Bulletin is posted, because vendors get access to the information one month in advance.
Over time, most major vendors have made improvements to the patching of new Android versions, with the majority of firmware for supported Android versions being patched recently.