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Apple To Shift US iPhone Assembly To India by 2026

• Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
• Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

Apple plans to relocate all US-bound iPhone assembly to India by 2026, aiming to reduce its reliance on Chinese manufacturing.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

• Apple will move all US iPhone assembly to India by the end of 2026.
• 80% of iPhones sold in the US are currently made in China.
• Manufacturing iPhones in India is still 5-8% costlier than in China.

Apple plans to move the assembly of all iPhones sold in the US to India by the end of 2026, aiming to reduce its reliance on China as trade tensions escalate. Currently, about 80% of the 60 million iPhones sold yearly in the US are made in China, as reported by Reuters .

Apple is urgently working with its Indian partners, Foxconn and Tata Group, to speed up the shift, reports Reuters. The Financial Times first reported the move, which comes as the tech giant faces rising tariffs on Chinese imports under Donald Trump’s trade policies.

Apple has already expanded in India, shipping $2 billion worth of iPhones to the US in March alone — a record for both Tata and Foxconn. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to boost smartphone manufacturing have helped, including cutting import taxes on some mobile parts, as previously reported by Aljazeera .

“If you’re charging import tax for intermediary goods, then you cannot actually be competitive versus somebody who does not. Their objective is to be as competitive as they can be to become the leading manufacturing hub,” said Babak Hafezi, CEO of Hafezi Capital, as reported more recently by Aljazeera .

Still, making iPhones in India is 5-8% more expensive than in China. “India will help, but it’s not moving the needle on China’s dependence for Apple. It will take years to make this move, as Apple is caught in the tariff storm,” told to Aljazeera Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Aljazeera reports that despite the challenges, Apple’s assembly of iPhones in India has already grown by 60% over the past year, reaching around $22 billion in value. Yet, only about 20% of the world’s iPhones are currently made in India.

Image by Greg Martínez, from Unsplash

Open-Source Tool Can Disable Most Remote-Controlled Malware Automatically

• Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
• Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

Cybersecurity researchers at Georgia Tech have created a new tool that removes malware from infected devices, by turning the malware’s own systems against it.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

• ECHO repurposes malware’s update system to disable infections.
• It automates malware removal in just minutes.
• Tool is open-source and presented at NDSS 2025.

The tool, called ECHO, uses the malware’s built-in update features to shut it down, stopping remote-controlled networks of infected machines, known as botnets, as first reported by Tech Xplore (TX).

ECHO’s open-source code is now available on GitHub and has shown success in 75% of tested cases. The researchers applied their tool to 702 Android malware samples and achieved successful removal of infections in 523 cases, as explained in their paper .

“Understanding the behavior of the malware is usually very hard with little reward for the engineer, so we’ve made an automatic solution,” said Runze Zhang, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, as reported by TX.

Botnets have been causing problems since the 1980s and have grown more dangerous in recent years. The malware Retadup spread across Latin America in 2019, according to TX. The threat was eventually neutralized but it required substantial time and effort to do so.

“This is a really good approach, but it was extremely labor-intensive,” said Brendan Saltaformaggio, associate professor at Georgia Tech, as reported by TX. “So, my group got together and realized we have the research to make this a scientific, systematic, reproducible technique, rather than a one-off, human-driven, miserable effort.”

TX reports that ECHO works in three steps: it analyzes how the malware spreads, repurposes that method to send in a fix, and then pushes out the code to clean the infected systems. It’s quick enough to stop a botnet before it causes major damage.

“We can never achieve a perfect solution,” said Saltaformaggio, as reported by TX. “But we can raise the bar high enough for an attacker that it wouldn’t be worth it for them to use malware this way.”