BlackBerry appears to be the first non-Google OEM to roll out the January security patch for its Android smartphones. It's been less than a day since Google announced that the update would be rolling out to Nexus and Pixel devices, and BlackBerry has made a similar announcement.
The January security update is available immediately for BlackBerry smartphones running the Android operating system that were purchased through the company's online store. This means that carrier-branded phones are not yet eligible for the update.
To find out when your carrier-branded BlackBerry smartphone will receive this security update, you should contact your representative for more information.
According to Google, the January security patch should address 85 vulnerabilities that were discovered. Obviously, each OEM can add their own fixes in case they find other vulnerabilities that could affect their own devices.
BlackBerry has its own security bulletin in response to the Android security bulletin released yesterday. The long list of vulnerabilities fixed in this update includes critical, high, medium, and low issues.
Specifically, there are some vulnerabilities found in the Qualcomm that powers some of Blackberry's Android smartphones. There is also another vulnerability in the Qualcomm sound driver that could allow a local malicious app to execute arbitrary code within the kernel. Similar issues were found in the Qualcomm camera driver, Wi-Fi driver, GPU driver, and the Qualcomm bootloader.
