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80% of all Android apps are encrypting traffic by default

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By Catalin Cimpanu

for Zero Day

| December 3, 2019 — 18:00 GMT (18:00 GMT)

| Topic: Security

Researchers test Android’s VOIP components for the first time, find eight vulnerabilities
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Google reached another milestone in its quest to push for the broader adoption of the HTTPS standard.

In a blog post today, the US-based tech giant said that four out of five (80%) Android applications available for download through the official Play Store are encrypting their respective network traffic using HTTPS.

This means that traffic that enters or leaves one of these apps is encrypted and can’t be intercepted or read by third-parties.

Google expects this number to go up in the coming years, primarily due to a series of measures the company has slowly rolled out and enforced since 2016. This includes warnings in IDE tools and the Google Play developer dashboard.

Google has faired much better than Apple at enforcing HTTPS on its app developers. A report published in June 2019 found out that only a third of iOS apps were using ATS, a technology for encrypting an iOS app’s network traffic.

Besides Android app makers, Google has also been successful at pushing websites towards adopting HTTPS in the place of the vulnerable HTTP protocol.

According to the company’s Transparency Report, HTTPS usage inside Chrome is now between 85% and 95%, depending on the platform.

For example, 89% of all the websites loaded inside Chrome on Android are now loaded via HTTPS. On Chrome for Windows, this number is at 84%.

Something similar can also be seen for Firefox, with the organization recently reporting its own milestone, with Firefox loading more than 80% of all web pages via HTTPS for the first time ever, back in September.

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