Huh. Did they pass the information back to the relevant vendors, or just keep it in their toolbox for when they needed to say "See, Android is so insecure!"?
Edit: this is probably snarkier than it should be, but without reading a 30+ page white paper on my phone these seem to be OS and library issues not chipset issues. Did Apple do a big Bluetooth fix on their own stuff, or are they using (and fixing) some of the same libraries without passing vulnerabilities back to the library maintainers? I don't follow Apple enough to know.
That said, Android's lack of updates for older devices is its biggest weakness. Google is looking to fix this next version as they separate the HAL out. Something to look at is definitely if there would be a standard kernel with loaded modules or if it would still be left to manufacturers.
Yes, there will be bugs but refusing to properly address that ahead of time by separating and lowering privileges, applying sandboxes, and proactively auditing external attack surface is why Android is worse than iOS for security.
There's no PoC code out for this even and it's been many times longer than it would take to patch something like this in most cases.
What I'm saying is that going from "Linux has worse security design" to "use an iPhone" is just a non-sequitur - people choose devices and operating systems for reasons other than the best security design and there's no reason that an attack like this should force you onto a single platform. It comes off as nothing more than fanboyism.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why are you calling Linux a tire fire when it has had significantly less code execution and buffer overflow exploits than iOS?
The number of reported vulnerabilities does not have a strong correlation at all to how vulnerable something actually is. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for apple bugs; indeed apple does. Based on the above data, I'd even suggest that it "proves" iOS is significantly more secure. The bounties available for Linux are minuscule.