Building a smartphone is no easy task, and the number of people required to get a new flagship device out the door likely measures in the hundreds. All you need is one bad apple to install a benchmarking app, run it, and poof, the whole world instantly knows what your company is working on. How do you fix this issue if you can’t even trust your own employees? According to Android Police, Sony has decided to prevent their prototype from running applications like AnTuTu and Geekbench.
This will obviously not prevent shady employees from taking photos of unannounced devices and leaking them to the media, but at least engineers working on optimizing Android for a new smartphone won’t accidentally upload the specs of said smartphone to a publicly searchable database. Which Sony phones have already leaked thanks to AnTuTu? The Xperia L, Xperia T2, and a Chinese variant of the Z1. You might not think that this sort of data is relevant, but in today’s industry, companies can crank out a phone from concept to production in the span of less than three months. So if Samsung found out Sony was working on a 720p phone of a certain performance caliber, they could immediately start cranking out another Galaxy model. Does this mean the days of Sony leaks are done? Not even close. Like I said earlier, all it takes is one grumpy individual to ruin the surprise of Sony’s upcoming phones. And I’m sad to report that almost everything there is to know about the Xperia Z2 has already been leaked.
