iPhones are famously very secure devices, thanks to Apple’s finetuning of both the device itself and its App Store. However, a recent report suggests they could be a little less secure than otherwise thought, even if they are still outperforming Android.
Cybernews’ Ernesta Naprys has spent five days monitoring a fresh iPhone in Germany after installing 100 of the most popular apps. In that time, it made 16,542 DNS queries. These are essentially signs that a device is accessing servers from another place in the world. It made an average of 2711 to 4178 requests a day, with a spike of around 757 to 1865 around each day. However, it still continued to access servers while idle and during the user’s sleep. Naprys reports “Your iPhone does not go to sleep with you – it buzzes with activity, accessing your data and sensors”.
Though most of the queries are fairly standard with Apple accounting for 60% of all requests, Google accounting for 12, and Microsoft making 4% — one ping was made every day to Russia via Alibaba, an online marketplace. Despite having numerous Chinese apps like “Temu, TikTok, Wish, and Aliexpress, no queries were made to servers in China. Even Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, has an overseas domain that was contacted instead.
Naprys reports “Compared to the experiment with Android, the iPhone’s query numbers for unfriendly countries are low.”
How does it compare to Android?
Cybernews’report shows that Android, in just three days, contacted Russian servers 39 times. In less time than its iPhone study, the Android phone reached out 34 more times. Contact was also made at strange hours, often late at night or early in the morning. Servers in China were pinged 15 times, much more than the 0 times Cybernews’ iPhone pinged it.
In this report on Android, Naprys states that many Android apps ask “for too many dangerous permissions”, clarifying that some require you to entirely uninstall or disable the app before those permissions can be revoked. With the iPhone report being based on the German App Store, it is possible that these security problems could become worse as EU customers are allowed access to third-party app marketplaces.
