As part of a criminal investigation, authorities may need to break into an individual's smartphone. However, thanks to improved encryption technology and an increased emphasis on user data privacy, it is generally more difficult for police and other agencies to break into smartphones.

This is why "government encryption backdoor" legislation is being discussed again, and whether such legislation would actually help or just be an enormous security risk is being eagerly debated.

Much of these discussions have stemmed from the iPhone, but Apple's device seems to be actually easier to hack than the alternative.

A Vice (via Android Authority) report on law enforcement methods of cracking phone encryption quotes one of the article's interviewees, Fort Worth Police Detective Rex Kaiser, as saying that the latest Android phones are equivalent iOS devices than the equivalent iOS device, stating that they are actually more difficult to break into.

The quote in the Vice article makes it clear that this is a recent role reversal with regard to cell phone break-ins: "Some newer operating systems are harder to get data from than others. Some newer operating systems are more difficult to retrieve data from. I think a lot of these (cell phone) companies are just trying to make it harder for law enforcement to get data from these phones under the guise of consumer privacy.

"Now we're getting into iPhones; a year ago we couldn't get into iPhones, but we could get into Androids. Now we can't get into a lot of Androids."

"We can't get into a lot of Androids.

This is supported by the effectiveness of smartphone cracking firm Cellebrite in breaking into various phones; Cellebrite can easily open the iPhone X and earlier iPhones, but it can also open the Google Pixel 2 and Galaxy S9, the same software used on the S9 extracts very little information, and in the case of the Huawei P20 Pro, nothing at all.

This is not to say that these Android devices are unbreakable. It just means that a different, more laborious process is required to retrieve the requested data.

Android hardware and customized software builds are so diverse that it is difficult to build a universal tool for phone crackers to break into Android phones. Meanwhile, "Jailbreak," released late last year, permanently bypasses the security features of all iPhone models from iPhone 4s to iPhone X.

A separate report in yesterday's Washington Post argued that Apple's secrecy has backfired, making it impossible for companies and intelligence agencies to tell if an iPhone has been compromised. In contrast, Android's infrastructure is accessible to all, making it easier to find and fix exploitable flaws.

Apple's marketing focuses on how secure the iPhone is, but apparently it is not that difficult to open an iPhone when faced with common hacking tools used by the police.

Of course, all this could change depending on how Apple and Google update their operating systems in the future and, of course, what decisions the U.S. government and other authorities around the world make regarding encryption laws.