The Google Pixel 4a offers a lot of smartphone for its $349 price, and today it's been revealed that it's achieved something that most every other phone on the market lacks.
The Pixel 4a as well as the Pixel 4 and 4 XL have been certified by the Internet of Secure Things (ioXT) alliance. They're the first mobile devices to get this security certification.
ioXt is a group that aims to set baseline security requirements for connected devices so that users, enterprises, regulators, and others can easily understand the security of products and what they're doing to protect user privacy. It has more than 200 members, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Comcast.
The security requirements that ioXt has varies by product class. The ioXt Android Profile "enables smartphone manufacturers to differentiate security capabilities, including biometric authentication strength, security update frequency, length of security support lifetime commitment, vulnerability disclosure program quality, and preloaded app risk minimization."
The Pixel phones are given a rating by the ioXt in various categories, including Proven Cryptography and Security by Default. That latter category is one of the most important criteria that devices are judged by, explains Google, because it rates devices by scoring the risk of all the preloads on a particular device.
Google's Pixel phones are often praised because they're guaranteed to get three years of updates, including security patches, with updates that come straight from Google and often arrive before most other Android devices. Now Pixel 4 and 4a owners can rest easy knowing that their phones have achieved another level of security certification.
Google says that it plans to submit future Pixel phones for ioXt certification as well.