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How to protect my phone from cracking

duchacdominik

Lurker
May 10, 2018
1
0
Hello, I've been recently robed and my phone was stolen. It was Samsung Galaxy S9+. The phone had still like 35% baterry when it was stolen from me and when I tried to look for my device like 10 minutes after the incident I couldn't find my phone as it was probably switched off.

My friend who is like a mobile geek he told me that android phones are easy to crack and once Android devices get stolen, there is no chance of finding them again. So I bought a new android phone, the same as the last one and I would like to protect it in the best way possible. Is there any software or something that even when the phone is rebooted or cracked that it can still be tracked down?

That friend told me, that only ios users are well protected and that whoever steals an ios device can't Crack it.

Is there anything I can do to protect my android device as well as an ios device?

Thank you in advance.
 
Hello, I've been recently robed and my phone was stolen. It was Samsung Galaxy S9+. The phone had still like 35% baterry when it was stolen from me and when I tried to look for my device like 10 minutes after the incident I couldn't find my phone as it was probably switched off.

Not only was it possibly switched off, but there's a chance the assailant may have pulled the SIM out and thrown it away. And if a phone is off and/or offline, it's impossible to track and locate, and a thief or fence probably knows that. Have you called your carrier yet, report the theft and get the phone and SIM blacklisted?

My friend who is like a mobile geek he told me that android phones are easy to crack and once Android devices get stolen, there is no chance of finding them again. So I bought a new android phone, the same as the last one and I would like to protect it in the best way possible. Is there any software or something that even when the phone is rebooted or cracked that it can still be tracked down?

Well if the phone isn't online, like if the SIM was removed or it isn't connected to WiFi. no software can prevent that happening. But there is FRP.

That friend told me, that only ios users are well protected and that whoever steals an ios device can't Crack it.

Is there anything I can do to protect my android device as well as an ios device?


Thank you in advance.

Most recent Android devices including S9 have FRP (Factory Reset Protection), which means the phone can't be reactivated and used without knowing your Google details, including password. Which AFAIK is secure and can't be cracked. iPhones may have something similar where it's linked to an Apple account, I don't know for sure.
 
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Your friend is apparently quite a Apple fan-boy so be at least a little skeptical of his views on smartphones. From an over-all perspective, Apple may have an edge on Android as far as security but it's not as drastic as he's putting on.
Just going by statistics can only be a rough guide, as different sources rely on different metrics but just as an example by this April 2018 study, Android leads at over 70% of the world market share with iOS at under 20%.
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/#monthly-201704-201804-bar
(Keep in mind other studies show Android at over 80% and iOS below 15%). No matter which one you choose to follow there's no denying Android has a clearly larger market share than Apple. Now take a look at different issue -- actual, documented security vulnerabilities (not the media fluff that gets touted as 'extremely dangerous' but are often just minor exploits that have little to no bearing on actual security issues). Just a basic search in the CVE database
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures
for 'Android' turns up 4542 entries
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=android
while 'iOS' results in 2235 entries
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=ios
Yes Android has a significantly larger number, but that's a roughly 49% difference in exploits compared to the market share difference of 29%. If the myths your friend is feeding you were close to being reality, those percentage numbers should be skewed at a much, much, much higher amount. So yeah, iPhones may be more secure but once you add in the services like Apple's iCloud, a security weak-point, you have this really secure phone that has integral online service holes. That's the part the media usually ignores.

If you want to use your Android phone safely, the bottom line is to just use your phone in an intelligent way (i.e. avoid opening those emails from some Nigerian prince, don't side-load APKs from miscellaneous web sites, etc.)
 
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