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

arstechnica.com

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

#151

Post by epolanski »

greatgib wrote: post #34

It'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. It'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'm not wrong, there was a guy that had to stay years in…

Stories about airport security and officers demanding access your phone is one of the reasons I will never come to the US.

An (Italian) friend of mine was stuck in Newark for 8 hours after he refused access to his phone, dragged in some room and questioned for hours along his wife while split from him own kids, even though he later gave them the password (he initially said no because he thought it was out of the line, he had nothing to hide).

He left livid for Italy 16 hours later despite being free to go on with his vacation.

Land of the free my ass.

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

#152

Post by surajrmal »

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

As the article alludes to, Apple recently shipped the same policy to iOS so this is likely just following the precedent from them. Android developers don't pay attention to community forks.

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

#153

Post by lostlogin »

MattSayar wrote: post #133
joak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to be able to disable this option: I use old Android phones as servers and don't want them to reboot every 3 days.

Completely agree, I don't want this to disrupt the Bop Spotter https://walzr.com/bop-spotter

Thanks for this.

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

#154

Post by surajrmal »

edelbitter wrote: post #97
amelius wrote: post #35

Can't it run two OSes, so the booting becomes instantaneous? (Like swapping graphics buffers, but now with the entire OS)

Android ships a feature called bootchart which you can use to prove that most of the time your phone spends booting.. it is actually far from bottlenecked on storage or compute - bugs to be fixed; not worked around with even more complexity. Heck, some phones do not even stop playing their vendors fancy animated logo when they are finished before the animation is.

Does it take into consideration thermal and power? Doing too much too quickly can be bad for both, so sometimes it's worthwhile to go slower.

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

#155

Post by LinuxBender »

al_borland wrote: post #66
Bender wrote: post #16

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.

A wipe seems extreme. An unexpected trip to the hospital could leave someone with a wiped phone when they come to.

Someone may want that behavior if they were intentionally injured and kept from their phone for 3 days. The perpetrators will eventually get past the hospital security. Contents should be backed up in a safe place either way, possibly in a place that someone that cares about them may access it.

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

#156

Post by surajrmal »

bigyabai wrote: post #105
67593874748 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google locking features behind the closed source, proprietary Play Services is "more reason to move to AOSP"?

You don't need Play Services for this feature to work. The design is not proprietary or even hard to reverse-engineer.

The reason it is implemented in play services is likely because of how much easier it is for them to ship the feature to the most phones possible.

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

#157

Post by rat9988 »

Krasnol wrote: post #143
kqr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds vendor-specific and not general for Android. I've never had that happen on any device but Windows and I would be very upset if it did happen.

What Android version do you use where it doesn't happen`?

Never happened on my samsung.

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

#158

Post by TylerE »

arghwhat wrote: post #117
kqr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds vendor-specific and not general for Android. I've never had that happen on any device but Windows and I would be very upset if it did happen.

This is default on iOS and on many Android versions. It's often configurable, but e.g. carrier policy or local vendors can enforce it. To have updates automatically install overnight is the maximally desirable scenario - waiting for user approval usually result in open vulnerabilities, and if you interact with a prompt you are by definition using your device and it is therefore a much worse time than while you're asl…

I hate overnight updates because a dialed one means I have no alarm and will be hours late for work.

And yes, this has actually happened to me at least twice.

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

#160

Post by layer8 »

elashri wrote: post #149
SXX wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I'm not super heavy Apple service user. For me Advanced Data Protection is defence against Apple itself and ability to keep little information I share via iCloud somewhat secret: mostly another backup of some photos and few other things. It's not like I'm trying to defend against some state actors or whatver.

But this still weaken your defense against apple or whomever you are trying to defend against.

Why not have the option, though?
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