Martijn *sigh* @ancarda: nakedsecurity.soph...

John Olinda Part of the problem is that in many parts of the world old phones are still being sold. My iPhone 4, Nexus One, and Motorola Droid are all vulnerable to things that have been patched in later devices and versions of their operating systems. Apple's advantage is that they control the hardware and thus the drivers. I just don't see a way to force hardware manufacturers to release updates unless you take Android closed-source and just tell hardware manufacturers what they have to do in order to run it. But I imagine most would just use older open-source versions of the OS and fork like Amazon did.

Mark Dain It should be possible to apply security patches even to a heavily modified Android, right? Either that or just ship stock Android with just enough tweaks / drivers to get it to work. Maybe it needs to be a selling point to come with stock Android?