How to check if your Android smartphone is up to date

Checking if your Android smartphone is up to date with the latest version available protects your device from hacker attack

Our phone is a small bank of all our information. Inside the mobile devices we find conversations, photos, videos, applications, emails and credit card info. Protecting this sensitive data is extremely important, and the first step to accomplish this is to update our Android smartphone.

To protect your device from theft, you need to take a number of precautions. Such as setting a PIN that is difficult to decipher and using biometric sensors to unlock the smartphone screen, if possible. The dangers, however, are not only physical, with theft and tampering. Most cyber criminals act by exploiting the Net, and outdated Android phones are the ones with the most vulnerabilities and therefore the easiest to hit. So here's how to figure out if your Android smartphone is up to date.

Why it's important to update

Verifying that a device is up to date and has all the security patches installed is a critical step for our cyber security. And this also applies to tablets, computers and any other device we own. In addition to improving the user interface and some system bugs, updates serve, in fact, to eliminate vulnerabilities that manufacturers discover over time. These are flaws in the operating system and applications that could allow a cyber criminal to bypass the controls of the device to manage it remotely.

How to check if your phone is up to date

To check if your Android smartphone is up to date the first step is to activate the Wi-Fi connection. At this point we go to the Settings of the device and then on the item Device Information (the name of this section may vary slightly depending on the model of Android phone we own). In the page that opens, click on the words Software Update and then on Check for Updates. At this point we'll have to wait a few seconds, because the phone will do an online check to see whether or not there are new versions available. If there is an update to be installed, the smartphone will display it automatically and we'll just have to click on Update to complete the process. If there are no updates, the message "The phone is already updated to the latest version available" will appear.