Samsung is taking the fight to Apple
Android is changing as Google narrows the gap to iPhone. For many longtime Android users, these changes will land badly as their phones lock down for the first time. But for the vast majority it will help them keep safe. As far as Google might be going on this catch-up mission, Samsung is about go much further.
Apple doesn’t always get it right, as this month’s privacy backlash shows all too well, but the reality is that users are still safer and more secure on an iPhone. Android is more open to attack — period. Apple’s safeguards come down to control. Stringent App Store policies, less flexibility for apps to operate on devices, tighter privacy rules, ownership of hardware and software enabling end-to-end oversight.
At the heart of Android’s difference has always been the option to sideload apps. This open ecosystem has been the root of many — albeit not all — of Android’s security fails. “We’re trying to strike a balance,” Sundar Pichai says “We believe in choice,” but “it’s like a seatbelt in a car, we are adding the protections so you can use it safely.”
Apple doesn’t believe in offering users the choice to take risks. There has never been any form of sideloading. At least not until the EU mandated more flexibility last year. A move that prompted Apple to warn that “sideloading on iPhone would put all users at risk, even those who make a deliberate effort to protect themselves by only downloading apps through the App Store. Allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on iPhone, incentivizing malicious actors to develop tools and expertise to attack iPhone device security at an unprecedented scale.”
All change. Google has been tightening restrictions part by part over the last 12-months. A cull of low-quality, high-risk Play Store apps, expanding Play Protect across all apps regardless of origin, enhancing its Play Integrity API to treat apps differently from outside Play Store and soon to treat them differently based on the OS version on the phone, and more open warnings on the risks from sideloading.
This all culminates with Android 15 — now playing on a Pixel near you and about to be released onto Samsungs as well. The upgrade wraps all the above tightenings into an OS designed with security in mind. It adds unsafe connection protection and live threat detection, using AI to monitor how an app actually behaves on your phone, flagging risks before any central monitoring has picked up issues.
All of which is a hammer-blow for the open sideloading of the past. “Android 15’s new sideloading restrictions could signal a shift for the Android ecosystem,” Android Police says, “challenging its historically open nature. These tighter security measures protect average users from malicious apps but risk alienating power users, amateur developers, modders, and enthusiasts who depend on Android’s flexibility. With Android 15 rolling out… the backlash to these changes quickly becomes apparent.”
While Samsung has been embarrassingly late to the Android 15 party, with its One UI 7 beta released just before the holidays, it’s ready for a wider release alongside the Galaxy S25 launch a month from now. And Samsung has taken a look at Android 15’s security restrictions and doubled down. The Galaxy-maker goes much further, offering the closest Android we’ve ever seen to Apple’s iPhone proposition.
Samsung has already been heading this way, more quickly than Google, defaulting to Maximum Restrictions last year to make sideloading difficult. Now with its Android 15 upgrade, “to protect against malicious apps from sideloading, One UI 7’s new Safe Install system works alongside Auto Blocker to send a warning when a user attempts to download from an unauthorized source, alerting them of security risks.”
Just as critically, Samsung is also doubling down on its Knox Matrix ecosystem with One UI 7, meaning the more Samsung devices a user owns, the safer that user will be. Not only does this nicely replicate Apple’s ecosystem, but it also makes it more difficult to trade Samsungs for Pixels or other Androids without losing the benefits. Apple’s walled garden comes to mind.
Make no mistake—this is just the beginning of the blurring of Android and iPhone. Just as Apple opens up to non-Apple default apps and non-Apple stores, Android and Samsung in particular are heading the other way. It’s long overdue, and for almost all mainstream users this is nothing but a good thing. Samsung and Apple dominate the global premium smartphone segment, and the fight has never been closer.
I predict that Samsung will further lock down its Galaxy devices in 2025 and beyond, one small change after another, making it ever more difficult to drive without that seatbelt. And this will extent to the security of on-device and in-cloud AI, opening up an entirely new threat landscape, just as AI-fueled cyberattacks become the norm. There is no place for risk-taking cellphones in this new world. Hardened Android users may not like it, but they’re almost certainly going to need to get used to it.