Google crossed another milestone in its quest to push for adopting broader HTTPS standards. The Silicon Valley-based tech giant recently stated that 4 out of 5 (which is about 80%) Android applications available for download through Play Store are already encrypting their respective network traffic through HTTPS.
Any traffic that enters or leaves any of these apps is already encrypted and cannot be intercepted or read by third-parties.
Google expects these numbers to go up by the end of 2020 as they have rolled out several measures and enforced them since 2016. One of them also includes warnings in IDE tools and the Google Play developer dashboard.
As compared to Apple, Google has fared much better at enforcing HTTPS on its app developers. Besides their Android devices, Google has also been successful in pushing in websites to adopt the HTTPS protocol instead of the HTTP one, which is extremely vulnerable.
According to Google’s transparency report, Chrome is now using HTTPs for 85–95% of its websites, depending on the platform. 89% of the websites loaded on Chrome or Android are now opening on the HTTPS platform. The same number is 84% in Chrome for Windows.
Google reported the adoption of a similar protocol for Firefox, as approximately 80% of websites opening on Firefox are opening on HTTPS.
