Sometimes it’s necessary for the authorities to break into a person’s smartphone as part of a criminal investigation. However, thanks to improving cryptography techniques and a growing focus on the privacy of user data, it’s generally getting harder and harder for police and other agencies to get inside phones.
It’s the reason why “government encryption backdoor” legislation is once again being discussed, and whether such laws will actually help or just be an enormous security risk is being passionately debated.
The quote given in Vice’s article reveals that this has been a recent role reversal when it comes to getting into phones: “Some of the newer operating systems are harder to get data from than others. I think a lot of these [phone] companies are just trying to make it harder for law enforcement to get data from these phones ... under the guise of consumer privacy.
“Right now, we’re getting into iPhones. A year ago we couldn’t get into iPhones, but we could get into all the Androids. Now we can’t get into a lot of the Androids.”
The sheer variety of Android hardware and customized software builds makes it hard for phone-crackers to build a universal tool to break into Android phones. Meanwhile, a "jailbreak" released late last year permanently bypasses the security functions of every iPhone model from the iPhone 4s to the iPhone X.
Although Apple puts a lot of focus in its marketing on how secure its iPhones are, apparently when faced with popular hacking tools used by the police, it’s not too hard to open one up.
