For years on Android Security and privacy teams are scrambling for the world’s most popular mobile operating system to make it more controllable and upgradeable, while also being open source and easy to deploy. And while scams, malware and rogue apps are still real threats, the debut of Android 13 at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday looks less like a sorting mode and more like a logical iteration. As Charmaine D’Silva, director of product management at Android, says, “This is the release where we bring everything together.”
If anything, Android’s big security and privacy issue is now trying to get users, device makers, and developers to understand and be motivated to use a range of new and recently released security features. And after launching so many privacy and security initiatives over the past few years, the Android team has a lot to maintain and try to fix at any given moment.
“We’re going to continue to go deeper, and it’s going to be an ongoing investment, but the challenge as you go deeper is that you end up fragmenting experiences, you’re actually confusing users unintentionally,” said Krish Vithaldevara, senior director of product management at Android. “It’s a very difficult problem to solve, and that’s what we’re going to solve with Android 13.”
Google Play Protect now scans around 125 billion apps a day on user devices to assess their behavior and try to identify security issues. And Google says its Messages app now blocks 1.5 billion spam messages a month in an effort to reduce phishing and other scams that actually reach users. And after finally introducing end-to-end encryption in Messages last year for one-to-one text messages with the long-awaited RCS messaging standard, Google says it will add end-to-end encryption later this year in beta for group chats as well.
“We feel both excited and hopeful,” Jan Jedzejovic, Messages product manager, told WIRED. “I’m excited because bringing group text messaging out-of-the-box and encrypted by default on Android is a huge upgrade for a large number of people around the world. Encouraging because cross-platform messaging still uses SMS/MMS and we really hope we can upgrade it to a more modern and encrypted protocol.”
Android 13 imposes more restrictions and user controls on the permissions that apps are granted and what data they can access. For example, the operating system gives developers the option to easily include Google’s photo selector, which allows users to select specific photos and videos to share with an app through the selection channel, rather than giving the app access to their entire library with photos. Google increasingly relies on the system access Android already has to provide specific data to apps, making it more like the bartender mixing drinks than the cashier at the liquor store. Similarly, Android 13 now requires apps to request permission to access audio files, image files, and video files separately as part of an effort to limit access to different storage buckets.
