US government adopting Android smartphones/tablets for field use

Android users, if you’re looking for another reason to feel proud of your choice of OS, you’ll be pleased to hear that the US government has started to adopt certain Android smartphones and tablets as their choice of OS for field usage. While we are aware that Android seems to be a popular choice amongst hackers to infect with malware and what not, the US government has certified a version of Android that is secure enough to store information, but not allowing it to transmit over cellular networks where it might be intercepted or leaving itself open to attacks.

The reason behind their choosing of Google’s Android platform over Apple’s iOS is because of how readily available Android was to them. As an open source project, Android has been made available to many developers, unlike iOS whose source code is not open source due to the Cupertino company’s philosophy of streamlining the entire process from hardware all the way down to software. Not to mention given that Android is open source, this would allow the US government to patch their version of Android to their own liking and level of security.

To save the government time and cost of building devices from scratch, this special build of Android will instead be installed on readily available commercial devices, but unfortunately (and for obvious reasons) they will not be available to the public, and will start rolling out to soldiers next month and government employees later on.