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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

#251
post #5
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

Heh, my first thought was “Don't they do this already?”, but apparently GrapheneOS was ahead of the curve there. Nice.

Still ahead of the curve, as it can be disabled on grapheneOS while it apparently won’t bee possible in Android ;)

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

#252
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

That’s weird. I wouldn’t expect Play Services to handle a system function like rebooting unrelated to any Google services.

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

#253

Mine randomly reboots semi-periodically already, even when it hasn't been shown as having downloaded an update. 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.

It would be easy to store alarms in an unencrypted partition or even EEPROM as they take no space. Calls is a harder problem, although in principle if the SIM doesn’t have a PIN, you should have everything you need.

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

#254
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

That’s weird. I wouldn’t expect Play Services to handle a system function like rebooting unrelated to any Google services.

Play services is how Google delivers many Android updates now so that all users can get security updates without waiting for the device vendor to publish it for each device.

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

#257
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

I think it’s already disrupted. The last entry is from November.

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

#258
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.

I've been fantasizing about building an iPXE netbooting phone for a while now, glad to see that I'm not the only one. Mine was sparked by seeing some journalists in my country getting arrested recently.

I think it should be doable _technically_, but I think getting the mobile radios working before the OS boots would be challenging.

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

#259
post #14
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.

not for security tho, it was for bloat/fixing random issues like a typical Win95 daily reboot.
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