An Economic Study of the Effect of Android Platform Fragmentation on Security Updates
Sadegh Farhang, Aron Laszka, Jens Grossklags

TL;DR
This paper models how Android vendors' customization and security investment decisions are influenced by market competition, consumer awareness, and regulatory fines, revealing impacts on security standards and pricing.
Contribution
It introduces a game-theoretic model of Android ecosystem customization, security investment, and regulation effects, providing insights into vendor behavior and security outcomes.
Findings
Vendors differentiate products to compete, affecting security investments.
Regulatory fines incentivize vendors to meet security standards.
Prices decrease with higher security standards under regulation.
Abstract
Vendors in the Android ecosystem typically customize their devices by modifying Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, adding in-house developed proprietary software, and pre-installing third-party applications. However, research has documented how various security problems are associated with this customization process. We develop a model of the Android ecosystem utilizing the concepts of game theory and product differentiation to capture the competition involving two vendors customizing the AOSP platform. We show how the vendors are incentivized to differentiate their products from AOSP and from each other, and how prices are shaped through this differentiation process. We also consider two types of consumers: security-conscious consumers who understand and care about security, and na\"ive consumers who lack the ability to correctly evaluate security properties of vendor-supplied…
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