Samsung has, for some years now been known to keep their devices up-to-date with the latest version of Android. While they might not be the fastest out there, their flagship devices, even those quite a bit older still get the latest updates. Now, as part of a change brought in by Google last year, Samsung also includes monthly security updates with their regular software updates. Unlike a lot of other firms that either don’t offer up their own security fixes or just keep quiet about it, Samsung lists their own Security Bulletin, just as Google does each month. Included in this bulletin are fixes for all of Android from Google themselves as well as specific Samsung fixes, and the South Korean giant has just issued the bulletin for July, 2016.
At the time of writing, it appears as though Samsung has even managed to beat Google to the punch, as many are still waiting on Google to release the updates as well as the security bulletin itself for this month. Still, it is only the 6th of the month, so Google aren’t exactly dragging their feet just yet. Back to Samsung’s own bulletin, and they list all of the CVE-format vulnerabilities that will be included in Google’s update when it surfaces, as well as four fixes that are specific to Samsung devices. Of those, they could not disclose two of them, but the other two relate to a vulnerability in the audio service as well as the IPC socket. While the latter is listed as affecting devices running Android 4.4 KitKat and above, the former seems to affect all Samsung devices that used the Samsung Professional Audio SDK.
While Samsung users will be anxiously expecting an update right about now, they should be aware that these updates from Samsung only make their way to “select flagship devices” which pretty much rules out devices that are a little long in the tooth as well as those that aren’t exactly at the top of Samsung’s ladder. If nothing else, this is yet more evidence that Samsung has grown to take security updates as well as updates in general a little more seriously. All that’s left is for the firm to extend these updates to budget-minded devices and Samsung will have pretty much solved many of their update problems.