Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

imcritic wrote: post #6

Isn't this stupid? Why not flush something properly in the RAM instead to wipe the "cached" secrets? A full restart feels like an overkill.

Not really.

Restart - simple with known and predictable effects, data no longer accessible, all secrets flushed no matter where they were or cached.

Turn off disk encryption, suspend all running services, overwrite all secrets in the O/S wherever they are, and then restore all that on entering password. Probably can't do anything about secrets cached by actual apps. Complex, hard to maintain and probably buggy.

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

#12

Post by crote » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

imcritic wrote: post #6

Isn't this stupid? Why not flush something properly in the RAM instead to wipe the "cached" secrets? A full restart feels like an overkill.

That "something" is at least the entire userspace, so any attempt at doing so ends up being UX-equivalent to a full restart - while having a decent chance of leaving unintended trace data lying around in memory.

A full restart guarantees that everything will be wiped.

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

#13

Post by Beijinger » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

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

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

#14

Post by sva_ » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

jfkimmes wrote: post #2

This is a Google Play Services update. For GrapheneOS users without GApps wondering: A similar feature is already built-in: https://grapheneos.org/features#auto-reboot

Samsung has also had this feature for ages.

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

#15

Post by booleandilemma » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

I just want software that will do nothing user-observable without me explicitly asking it to. No pop-ups, no suggestions, no automatic anything.

I don't know if it'll take a fancy buzzword or what. Unobtrusive software? Silent Software?

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

#16

Post by Bender » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

Not bad. If I could make a feature request it would be something like, After 3 days of being idle:

- [ ] Reboot

- [ ] Power Off

- [X] WIPE triple opt-in

Maybe there is a custom phone OS for this that makes the phone act more ephemeral and network boot off my self hosted iPXE/immich server? A dumb smart phone so to speak. An ephemeral diskless phone.

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

#17

Post by mcraiha » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:41 PM UTC

udev4096 wrote: post #7

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

Can you set the time to one minute?

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

#18

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

Wait, why is this presented as a good thing?

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.

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

#19

Post by devrandoom » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #4

gumbojuice wrote: post #3

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

You should be able to switch this off, if you notice it being enabled, so (now you know about it) it should be a one-time downtime.

I skimmed through the docs, couldn't see anything about soaking disabling it.

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

#20

Post by 627467 » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

I'm surprised this is something taken seriously only now by stock android. Isn't it known universally that AFU devices are insecure? What's the point of adding strict password policies, biometrics etc, if data from a stolen phone can be (relatively) trivially be exfiltrated unencrypted?

Samsung'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's not perfect but it's something. iOS seems to have some unclear logic to either restart or re-request password (not biometrics).

This should be standard