Google's push for broader adoption of the HTTPS standard is paying off and now 80 percent of all Android apps are encrypting their traffic by default.
In a blog post, the search giant said that four out of five Android apps in the Google Play Store are encrypting their network traffic using HTTPS which means that the data sent to and from these apps cannot be intercepted or read by third-parties.
Google also expects the number of apps using HTTPS to grow in the coming years as the result of a series of measures the company began rolling out in 2016 such as warnings in IDE tools and the Google Play developer dashboard.
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This is one area in which Google has been able to outperform Apple as the iPhone maker has had difficulty getting its app developers to use HTTPS. In fact, according to one report published in June, only a third of iOS apps are using ATS to encrypt their network traffic.
HTTPS adoption
In addition to getting Android app developers to use HTTPS, Google has also been successful at getting websites to adopt the new standard as opposed to using HTTP which is vulnerable to SQL injections as well as cross site scripting (XSS).
The company's Transparency Report even shows that HTTPS usage in Google Chrome is now somewhere between 85 and 95 percent depending on the platform. For instance, 89 percent of all websites loaded inside Chrome on Android are now loaded via HTTPS, while on Chrome for Windows, this number is 84 percent.
Mozilla has made similar progress and back in September, it revealed that over 80 percent of all web pages loaded in Firefox are now loaded via HTTPS.
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Via ZDNet
