Android Phones Will Soon Reboot Themselves After Sitting Unused For 3 Days (arstechnica.com) 93
An anonymous reader shares a report: A silent update rolling out to virtually all Android devices will make your phone more secure, and all you have to do is not touch it for a few days. The new feature implements auto-restart of a locked device, which will keep your personal data more secure. It's coming as part of a Google Play Services update, though, so there's nothing you can do to speed along the process.
Google is preparing to release a new update to Play Services (v25.14), which brings a raft of tweaks and improvements to myriad system features. First spotted by 9to5Google, the update was officially released on April 14, but as with all Play Services updates, it could take a week or more to reach all devices. When 25.14 arrives, Android devices will see a few minor improvements, including prettier settings screens, improved connection with cars and watches, and content previews when using Quick Share.
Google is preparing to release a new update to Play Services (v25.14), which brings a raft of tweaks and improvements to myriad system features. First spotted by 9to5Google, the update was officially released on April 14, but as with all Play Services updates, it could take a week or more to reach all devices. When 25.14 arrives, Android devices will see a few minor improvements, including prettier settings screens, improved connection with cars and watches, and content previews when using Quick Share.
I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes, I think rebooting another person's computer should require their permission.
Re: I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:5, Insightful)
For the most part, this will not intrude in people's day to day lives. It will lock phones that have been stolen by criminals/police, which is cool.
I use an android phone for my TV remote though and it's incredibly stripped down to the point that I only charge it monthly. I don't really want it to reboot every few days since that'll eat into the battery life and do nothing for security since there is no lock set.
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It will lock phones that have been stolen by criminals/police, which is cool.
That'd be just a little inconvenience for them. They could just plug in a mouse jiggler, or just touch the screen every other day (which can also be automated).
Re: I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:2)
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When my android phone reboots, it loudly goes "Hello Moto" in heavily accented English. You can silence the boot up "chime" in a setting, but that setting is wiped every time a system update comes in.
I'll probably throw it away the first time that reboot chime wakes me up.
Re:I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're the type of person who needs a phone to run processes unattended for 72 hours you're likely in the 0.01% of users and know enough to disable this first. This is one for the normies and they need things like this.
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What normie doesn't touch their turned on phone for 72 hours or more? Hardly "normal" behavior. Most people can't go 72 minutes without touching their phone.
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No but if they lose it or it's stolen it's good to do and as you mention correctly, it's really only under those circumstances this happens, so this is a fine idea imo.
Re:I don't want my phone rebooting (Score:5, Insightful)
I have VLC as my primary media player. Every time the phone is restarted, it blanks its own cache about what music I have on it, and refuses to play anything until it's searched my storage for music which usually takes half an hour and only starts when you start the app (it doesn't, say, run in the background doing this automatically on boot.) It's f---ing annoying as it is, but at least it only happens once every few weeks.
I'm sure this is an edge case, I mean, with the headphone jack removal being passively accepted by most consumers I have to assume most people don't listen to music on their smartphones any more, but there are plenty of issues like this that are going to come up increasingly if a phone automatically reboots all the time.
I really hope this "feature" can be disabled.
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I have VLC as my primary media player. Every time the phone is restarted, it blanks its own cache about what music I have on it, and refuses to play anything until it's searched my storage
Wow, what a shitty design.
I've been getting less and less impressed with VLC lately, it's been behaving more and more poorly for me.
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I use VLC in the same way as the above poster and I've noticed this as well. Fortunately, I've got many different music folders divided between all the genres that I like to listen to. This keeps my individual libraries limited and it doesn't have to go through ALL the folders, just the one I need.
I also have fewer then 2000 mp3s with no folder containing more then 500.
Still, it's annoying after a reboot to need to restart vlc and yes, let it update it's library again.
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I have VLC as my primary media player. Every time the phone is restarted, it blanks its own cache about what music I have on it
If I had to guess, VLC media player feels a need to rescan your library in case you swapped SD cards while the device's power was off.
and refuses to play anything until it's searched my storage for music which usually takes half an hour
The fact that VLC doesn't use stale library data until it finishes rescanning in the background is a design defect. The same thing would happen in the case of a shutdown due to a critically low battery. I encourage you to report this defect to VideoLAN, the publisher of VLC.
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Try Pulsar instead for playing music. It does not behave like that and I find it more lightweight and with a better UI than VLC for this purpose. I still use VLC for video.
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I'm sure this is an edge case
I'm sure it's a bug. Honestly I have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm a VLC user on Android and I regularly reboot my phone.
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The summary said this would only be done if the phone was locked. If the phone is locked, it's quite unlikely this would interrupt anything. So "intrusive" is probably the wrong word. Now a system update is intrusive. That drastically changes the state of the system. A simple reboot of a phone that's currently locks...not really intrusive. Controlling, perhaps. (How difficult is it to disable? ... Well, I guess I'll find out...or not, because I don't think I've ever left my phone on and untouched for
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If I have running processes that I don't want interrupted I obviously don't want this type of "help" from Google.
The Android system is designed around an expectation that an application will save its state when its "activity" (its window) becomes hidden. Background services are expected to save their state periodically as well.
It's a phone. (Score:2, Insightful)
If I have running processes that I don't want interrupted I obviously don't want this type of "help" from Google.
It's a phone. Stop calling it a computer. If you're doing serious work or having "running processes" on your phone you're doing something wrong.
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*puts on my autism hat* yes you're right.
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Will this be done without my consent?
One bright side of this is it'll upset whoever is trying to get into the phone without consent.
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Android used to have the feature on by default where it wiped the phone after a number of incorrect patterns. After three times of my toddler getting ahold of my phone and getting it back wiped, I found the feature and turned it off. Whoever decided to enable that by default, I would like to punch in the face as hard as I possibly can.
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Where Android is ahead of Apple is using accelerometers to log out on sudden acceleration, like when a thief on a bicycle grabs your phone out of your hand.
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My phone is locked anyway. If it's stolen, they will have to actively keep it engaged because after 30 seconds, my phone locks and you need the pin to get in. Do most people not have auto-lock on their phone? Pretty sure some apps require this to function. I'm near positive one of those *Pay services required it. Hard to remember, I almost never use *pay apps since I always have my CC and wallet on me. I figure, not using those *pay apps means one less entity knowing about my financial purchases. It's bad e
Feature I would pay for? (Score:2)
Upon reflection, I would NOT chip in to support this feature, and if I was given the freedom to choose a smartphone without the auto-reboot feature I would pick that smartphone over an otherwise similar smartphone. Of course ceteris is never paribus, but... (I actually suspect Samsung already implemented such a feature, but either didn't want to say anything about it or I missed the announcement.)
Counterexample: A feature that should properly be implemented at the OS level would be better battery management
About time they reintroduced this (Score:5, Interesting)
They had an automated reboot built in for a long time that you could enable, but then, at some point, they removed the feature, at least from their Pixel phones. Now, all of a sudden it's a good idea again when they realized that it improves security against phone theft scenarios.
Hopefully they will also allow us to schedule our reboots again too.
"phone theft" (Score:2)
You mean, the police seize the phone. (Which I agree is "theft" but not how most people understand the word.) Run of the mill criminals don't have the tools to get into a locked phone, nor do they care. They just sell the phones to be disassembled and scrapped for parts. The police need time to hack into the phone and it's much harder to hack into the phone once it's rebooted because there's nothing in cleartext in memory.
If a criminal wants to use your phone's contents he just yanks it out of your hands an
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I was including police seizure in my "theft" term.
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I was including police seizure in my "theft" term.
As it should be. Theft is "removal from you posession against your will". It is a form of attack. Does not matter what some words on some paper say.
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My guess is phones are stolen often enough in some regions that people buy 2nd hand or cheap or stop buying smart phones. And that is something Google would have a stake in.
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Indeed. This is likely a good idea regarding security. I would want to be able to set it to 24h though or even lower.
Such innovation /s (Score:5, Informative)
#!/bin/bash
# Get the idle time in milliseconds
idle_time=$(xprintidle)
# If the idle time is more than 3 days (259200000 ms), reboot
if [ "$idle_time" -gt 259200000 ]; then
echo "System has been inactive for 3 days. Rebooting now..." | mail -s "Rebooting due to inactivity" user@example.com
sudo reboot
fi
-- crontab --
# Run script every hour
0 * * * *
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Re:title You didn't think of it until someone just mentioned it. It's easy to implement someone else's ideas. It's also easy to shit on them. What original ideas have you come up with recently?
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The crontab utility, was written in 1975 by Ken Thompson and Brian W. Kernighan at AT&T Bell Labs for the Unix operating system.
Bash (Bourne Again Shell) was written in 1987 by Brian Fox.
also another good security option... (Score:3)
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Every phone these days should have a 'witness' function that activates recording to the cloud destination of your choice, from a lock screen. Just why not? Make sure everyone, everywhere can immediately start recording something that can't be confiscated or destroyed immediately.
The next item should be a 'wipe on secondary password'. A nice background wipe that opens to a default phone while wiping the normal partition in the background. And that ought to come with an automatic pre-programmed SMS, email
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Just why not?
Because then anyone who grabs your phone can rake up a massive net, roaming, or cloud bill for you. That said, most phones already let you take a picture/video from the lock screen. I don't know if long videos are streamed to cloud backups, but I'm sure any photos get there fairly quickly. So the feature kind of already exists.
As nice as that wipe feature would be for security, destruction of evidence is a crime so using that feature when detained by police would be a crime.
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Three lock screen codes - one for unlocking, one for the witness function, and one for the discrete wipe.
As for 'destruction of evidence'... sure. But the whole point is plausible deniability. "I didn't wipe my phone, I just never configured it after I bought it". If you're in a place where that doesn't work in court, you're already fucked enough that you probably want the phone contents deleted regardless.
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While that sounds great and all (it really does!) it sounds like something you would only fine in an open source phone not controlled by a corporation or you would be CIA or some spy that needs upmost security for their device.
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Android has something like that. If you press the power button 5 times rapidly, you get emergency mode. You can configure it to record video, which is protected from deletion and uploaded to the cloud if network access is available. You can also send text messages to contacts, call emergency services, that sort of thing.
If you want to power the phone off, hold the power button down. Eventually it will force it to turn off.
Note that manufacturers can change how this works, so check your specific device.
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That is a really bad idea. I often get the fingerprint reades to try to recognize the wrong finger by accident.
GurGle Play Services, eh? (Score:2)
I need to check, but that stuff was one of the first things I disabled on my new phone last year.
I install the few programs I use either manually or via F-Droid.
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I don't use BIOMETRICs, On Purpose.
I'm not going to either. Biometrics is not secure, and can be compelled.
Google play malware (Score:1)
Yet another reason not to have Google play on your phone.
double-edge sword (Score:3)
While I do understand this from a security perspective, since a fresh boot requires fingerprint or pin to decrypt the main system's user contents.
This needs to be OPTIONAL.
Why? Well, not every Android phone needs this type of security. For instance, I take used Android phones, put a data-only SIM card into them, plug them into a router, enable USB Tethering, and use them as internet backups. Main fiber/cable internet goes out? Router automatically routes over the USB connection. Or alternatively, I have some that run a VPN endpoint and are strictly used for out-of-band management in remote sites.
Phone reboots? Tethering is off. That simple. It breaks this entire setup. (Yes, I know, "buy something else" - great answer when this ALREADY worked, and was a great way to recycle old phones when pulling them out of service)
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well an real cell modem does not have an battery time bomb that can blow
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I really do suspect ulterior motives in this. They're covering the ulterior motive with 'for your security'. It's entirely possible that android phones are being used in ways they don't like, where it's not a use constantly making sure they can collect data, and they want to make them more inconvenient for that purpose so it doesn't intrude on their data collection. It could be also that their data collection processes get stuck or things like that.
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not a use constantly making sure they can collect data
Well if they implement it like Apple does updates, it'll reset some of your settings in order to enable better data mining. Aka, installing an iPhone update re-enables bluetooth. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple/Google starts re-enabling things like that on reboot if they don't already.
Though if a reboot take out RAM only viruses, then there's less of a chance of bad news stories about botnets taking over Android phones.
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since a fresh boot requires fingerprint or pin to decrypt the main system's user contents.
You miss the point of this. A fresh reboot requires the PIN or pattern to be entered to unlock it. A fingerprint won't work.
Your fingerprints can be used to unlock a phone without your consent. The PIN or pattern requires consent (perhaps forced) and may be a violation of the 4th and/or 5th amendments if you are forced to reveal your code to law enforcement.
You should be using a dedicated WiFi hotpot device if you regularly need unattended hotspot capability for more than a day or two.
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My phone's hotspot was a nice stand in for a year for me when I was refusing to pay for cable service. It was just barely good enough. When I went back to school, I decided a higher speed, more stable link, was required and I don't regret it. I am still annoyed at the cost of the cheapest plan, but whatever. I have 4 different ISP options and yet, for some reason *right...* the cheapest plans all start around $50. Gee, how convenient for industry. No collusion here. nope no sir.
I dread to think how bad it i
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Well, not every Android phone needs this type of security.
Actually they do. Even the most benign use of an Android phone these days involves sensitive information, often financial.
For instance, I take used Android phones, put a data-only SIM card into them, plug them into a router, enable USB Tethering, and use them as internet backups.
Those are no longer phones. They are whatever Frankenstein's monster you hacked together. You're very unique here. Please don't call what you are doing a "phone".
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If that's the case, then he shouldn't be getting forced updates for his Not-phone. That should also be a feature to disable if one wants to. It's my device after all.
Re:Good news is (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well even if it was part of an OS update they'd still be wrong. *Most* Android devices these days receive updates for a typical expected life of a phone. Samsung: 7 years, Google: 7 years, Xiaomi hybrid 7 years (OS only for the first 4). That covers most Android devices.
Re:Good news is (Score:4, Informative)
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Is that ALL Pixel phones?? As in as far back as a Pixel 4a 5g??
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No, it started with Pixel 7 or 8 (I don't recall exactly). 4a (5G) has been out of support for perhaps a couple of years.
Re: Good news is (Score:3)
My Chinese brand one plus 13 R is already on the Android March security update. And it was cheaper than the iPhone 16e
Follow the leader (Score:2)
Pure android is a made up dis by apple fanboys, a lot of new android features were on Samsung devices first then in cooperated into android, this and multitasking/multi-windows
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Yeah, it does indicate that this is for ulterior reasons. Sure, maybe law enforcement is charging the phone and leaves it alone for 3 days or something, or a criminal, so it locks it down more but I really suspect it's something else is why they want to reboot it.
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Honestly, 95% of android phones left sitting for 3 days will run out of battery. Grabbing this feature from GrapheneOS isn't that big a deal.
A phone left sitting runs for weeks, you using it actively causes it to run out of battery. I broke the screen on my phone and couldn't turn it off. It ran for over 2 weeks before the battery finally died (I could tell because my bluetooth headset kept connecting to it).
Even now overnight my new phone loses about 1-2% battery.
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That 1%-2% sounds about right, as I charge my phone over night but of course it stops once full. I tend to wake up to exactly that amount gone.
Don't want (Score:2)
Though then again, my phone isn't Android ...
I use my phone as a phone, not all that other stuff. (I have a tablet for that.) So it isn't strange for me to not use it for a week. Rebooting would actually mean using the battery more. And any limits on what time of day it does this? If it happens just before someone decides to call me (not likely obviously, but not impossible) or need to make one myself.
A better choice would be to reboot when it is charging, as you're unlikely to suddenly want it then. Or ins
I hope the time is adjustable (Score:3)
The time period should be much shorter, like 12 hours.
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>"The time period should be much shorter, like 12 hours."
The whole concept should be optional.
The time period should also be a user setting.
These types of mandates without user control are beyond frustrating. It is bad enough to make a change and default/opt people into it. That I can excuse for many things, especially if it is for security. But to not even allow control at all is hostile.
Also, not everything Android is a "phone." For example, I have tablets that are not used for several days, and I
Puzzle me this (Score:3)
Which part of the Android OS is less secure? The Linux underbelly running things? Or the Android gui on top of the Linux kernel?
Asking for a friend.
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The user installing things. The police actively attempting to extract data from it. How often have you been asked to hand over your Linux computer when pulled over by the police in a hostile country (like the USA)?
Android isn't less secure, it's higher risk due to being more actively and frequently targeted.
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No cop has ever asked me for my phone during a traffic stop. Of course, I haven't been pulled over in 5 years, so maybe things are different. Why would someone hand over their phone for a traffic stop anyway? I mean, it's in my pocket since I'm driving and don't even need it at that time.
I can't possibly see how they would have any reason to even ask. I'd just say no. It's locked and it's a traffic stop...
Though I am very boring. You could dump the contents of my phone and my entire car and would be sorely
Fix (Score:2)
Intel (Score:1)
Home Assistant (Score:1)
Reboot after 3 days unused (Score:2)
Work Phone, long weekend...
Easter is coming up.
(In some countries at least, that's a long weekend.)
Personal Phone, it means you're dead (I guess I have been watching to many crime dramas)
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I mean, if someone I know hasn't responded to me in 3 days, I would be rather concerned for their safety. A day later? Sure, even two but I've never seen three unless I was told ahead of time. For instance, my parents went on a cruise and reception can be non-existent sometimes.
Huh, security (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft have had this feature for ages (Score:1)
Sorry, but BFU = Big Fucking Upgrade (Score:2)
Now get off my lawn.