Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days

It&#x27;s good to have an option like that, even being a default, but there definitively need a switch to disable that if it is your own will.<p>It&#x27;s not even necessarily that good enough against cops, because in a lot of shitty countries, even some pretending to be democratics, not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished. If I&#x27;m not wrong, there was a guy that had to stay years in jail until he would comply with the judge order to unlock his device.

This is a Google Play Services update. For GrapheneOS users without GApps wondering: A similar feature is already built-in: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;features#auto-reboot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;features#auto-reboot</a>

They stole the idea from GrapheneOS and shipped a barely half-baked version with hardcoded time. GrapheneOS has configurable time for it since years

It&#x27;s not great news for my old phone used for wifi at our guesthouse (let&#x27;s a few security cams and our smart lock get online)

Not bad. If I could make a feature request it would be something like, <i>After 3 days of being idle:</i><p>- [ ] Reboot<p>- [ ] Power Off<p>- [X] WIPE <i>triple opt-in</i><p>Maybe there is a custom phone OS for this that makes the phone act more ephemeral and network boot off my self hosted iPXE&#x2F;immich server? A dumb smart phone so to speak. An ephemeral diskless phone.

Mine randomly reboots semi-periodically already, even when it hasn&#x27;t been shown as having downloaded an update.<p>That said, I think this is a fairly good idea, although with the encryption stuff they do, this will cause people who rarely use their phones to miss calls and alarms.

I found that this saves a lot of battery. My old Motorola G5G is now sitting idle, and I had to charge it every 4-5 days. I found that if the phone is restarted and <i>NOT unlocked</i>, it will stay charged for more than 10 days. My best guess is that a screen unlock is required to start many of the OS-level services, which takes up all the battery.<p>If this is true, then the new update will save a lot of battery for those phones that are sitting idle.

&gt; ...the new Play Services will limit that exposure to three days, even if it&#x27;s plugged in.<p>This will be fun to track down after a long weekend in embedded devices once this android patch number is old enough to be baked into crappy payment terminals and mall kiosks.<p>Probably overall a good thing though.

The Ars article seems to be inaccurate. Here is what the release notes say:<p>&gt; Security &amp; Privacy<p>&gt; [Phone] Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.<p>So it only &quot;enables&quot; a &quot;future&quot; &quot;optional&quot; feature.

So the phone will reboot it self, but...<p>1) There is no developer accessible API to allow app developers to create an app to allow me to script power options (example, as an end user I want to script a restart or shut down my phone nightly).<p>2) Asking Google Assistant will not restart or shut down the phone.<p>3) Apple and Android have made it harder to shut down the phone, requiring double key press kung fu to even bring up the power menu.

How is this going to work with SIM cards that need a PIN? I&#x27;ll be just unreachable until I notice the reboot?

Google saying they gonna reboot my phone for my safety - not suspicious at all ;)

One thing to consider is for SIM with a PIN lock, after reboot there won&#x27;t be any signal unless you input the PIN everytime.

How about instead of patching up our societies with technology we vote for the right people &#x2F; laws for once?

Samsung phones have had this feature for years. But it’s not what you think. Samsung phones gave you the option to reboot at various intervals because their phones would slow down over time and their solution was to allow the user to schedule a reboot. Now it’s.a security feature.

I just want software that will do nothing user-observable without me explicitly asking it to. No pop-ups, no suggestions, no automatic anything.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;ll take a fancy buzzword or what. Unobtrusive software? Silent Software?

I&#x27;m surprised this is something taken seriously only now by stock android. Isn&#x27;t it known universally that AFU devices are insecure? What&#x27;s the point of adding strict password policies, biometrics etc, if data from a stolen phone can be (relatively) trivially be exfiltrated unencrypted?<p>Samsung&#x27;s have had some feature that lets you set days of the week for the phone to restart (IME during early morning hours) automatically. It&#x27;s not perfect but it&#x27;s something. iOS seems to have some unclear logic to either restart or re-request password (not biometrics).<p>This should be standard

This feature is optional: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;product-documentation&#x2F;answer&#x2F;14343500#:~:text=%5BPhone%5D%20Enables%20a%20future%20optional%20security%20feature%2C%20which%20will%20automatically%20restart%20your%20device%20if%20locked%20for%203%20consecutive%20days." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;product-documentation&#x2F;answer&#x2F;1434...</a>

&quot;unused&quot;<p>firstly how about fixing software which forces &#x27;inactive hours&#x27; yet reboots even when cpu is at 100% utilisation, and software which dims or locks a mobile screen during video playback, and soft&#x2F;hardware which doesn&#x27;t respect user-supplied suspend&#x2F;standby timeouts in their power plans, and ....

« This actually caused some annoyance among law enforcement officials who believed they had suspects&#x27; phones stored in a readable state, only to find they were rebooting and becoming harder to access due to this feature. »<p>Wouldn&#x27;t the phones run out of battery after a few days anyway? Or do they keep them plugged in?

Can I configure this? In some cases I&#x27;d want the auto-reboot to be more aggressive (for example: after 3 hours). In other cases I&#x27;d want to disable the auto-reboot entirely.

Bad idea, as some people use old Android phones as IOT devices

&gt; This actually caused some annoyance among law enforcement officials who believed they had suspects&#x27; phones stored in a readable state, only to find they were rebooting and becoming harder to access due to this feature.<p>Lmao.<p>&gt; The early sluggishness of Android system updates prompted Google to begin moving parts of the OS to Google Play Services. This collection of background services and libraries can be updated by Google automatically in the background as long as your phone is certified for Google services (which almost all are). That&#x27;s why the inactivity reboot will just show up on your phone in the coming weeks with no notification. There are definitely reasons to be wary of the control Google has over Android with elements like Play Services, but it does pay off when the company can enhance everyone&#x27;s security without delay.<p>All the more reasons to move to AOSP forks.

Reminds me of ms windows. Except it reboots, no matter what’s running - for example if ms office is open with some unsaved changes.

I use microG instead of Google Play Services (for YouTube Vanced) so I wonder if they will implement an equivalent feature.

Why would it reboot instead of just power off?

I don&#x27;t touch my phone for days at a time. It&#x27;s just sitting there on my desk most days.<p>Not sure I&#x27;m too happy about this...

This is better actually, it will prevent bot farming or screen enabled activity that are in set and forget mode.

Android theft protection already locks my phone constantly, usually because I pick up my phone before unlocking it...

sounds good as opt-in configurable feature, but like it could have unforeseen consequences if forced on all users?

Another shitty idea that makes life harder:<p>If you are in a hospital- your phone will reboot to pin level. So you need to unlcok it few times and wait 3 minutes before it becomes reactive.<p>Then all your alarms will not work.<p>They add crap like this, yet the stock calendar app needs a separate appto play music to warn you. This of course breaksafter a reboot..<p>My grandma has a second phone as backup - it will constantly reboot and will never be ready to be used the time it is needed - as a backup. Since it will keep rebooting and requiring a pin.<p>Who comes up with those anti user ideas?<p>That we will probably be unable to turn off (or the option to turn off will disappear after few months). Also old people will not know how to turn it off

I imagine this is going to disrupt some Continous Integration setups that have fixed testing phones.

What if just while that occurs I need to make or receive an emergency call?<p>Sometimes it feels like tech is going backwards. Rather than rebooting, just develop a proper method to unload&#x2F;uncache, without making a device useless while that happens. Or use that multicore arch to swap the “dirty” instance with a clean one, in realtime.

Is it even possible to recover data in BFU state without knowing the pin?

I misread this as reformat and was concerned for a sec. This is a good idea.

My samsung rebooting in the middle of writing this comment

Thanks, No. I&#x27;d like to opt out of this.

Can&#x27;t it run two OSes, so the booting becomes instantaneous? (Like swapping graphics buffers, but now with the entire OS)

uhh, that&#x27;s going to disrupt Briar Mailbox, which relies on an Android device to act as an always-on node. I really hope there is a way to toggle this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;download-briar-mailbox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;download-briar-mailbox&#x2F;</a>

More &quot;security&quot; bullshit when all they want to do is secure their control over us.<p>Not falling for it anymore. Fuck Google and the rest of Big Tech.

Pff. Windows does this since decades. No? I vaguely remember this nag screens after unauthorized updates.

Wait, why is this presented as a good thing?<p>Why would I want my phone to auto reboot without my intervention? Never mind that it’ll never make three days on a single charge even if I don’t touch it.

Isn&#x27;t this stupid?<p>Why not flush something properly in the RAM instead to wipe the &quot;cached&quot; secrets?<p>A full restart feels like an overkill.