Abstract:Android is a modern and most popular software platform for smartphones. According to report, Android accounted for a huge 81% of all smartphones in 2014 and shipped over 1 billion units worldwide for the first time ever. Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry and Firefox trailed a long way behind. At the same time, increased popularity of the Android smartphones has attracted hackers, leading to massive increase of Android malware applications. This paper summarizes and analyzes the latest advances in Android security from multidimensional perspectives, covering Android architecture, design principles, security mechanisms, major security threats, classification and detection of malware, static and dynamic analyses, machine learning approaches, and security extension proposals.