It's not, but you hear about them more often because they're America's attack dog. AFAIK China has their own mobile spyware too, and the US has several private

It's not, but you hear about them more often because they're America's attack dog. AFAIK China has their own mobile spyware too, and the US has several private companies that make spyware too. Smartphones are juicy targets. Most people have one, originally by choice and now by social mandate. And people have a habit of loading lots of personal data on them - at a minimum, just by using the location features on the device, which produces a near-perfect location tracking log. Lots of governments would love nothing more than to have access to telepathy - i.e. actual mind reading - to figure out which citizens were loyal, disloyal, engaged in criminal behavior, etc. And having a full unencrypted phone backup is basically a mind rip. The only countries that aren't interested in mobile spyware are countries not big enough to afford a spyware engineering org.