Samsung phones have had this feature for years. But it’s not what you think. Samsung phones gave you the option to reboot at various intervals because their phones would slow down over time and their solution was to allow the user to schedule a reboot. Now it’s.a security feature.
Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
241–250 of 357 posts
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, yeah that seems wrong. I don't get reboots on devices I use frequently; I think it is only supposed to kick in when the device is not in use for a long time (it is meant to stop police who have a locked device they will try to brute force into).
Are you on latest iOS? Are you stilllocking / unlocking the phone once in 3 days at least? 7 days timeout on was introduced in iOS 18, but then decreased to 3 days. I dont use this device physically - it's just a phone that always connected to power and sit on top of mac mini for debugging and running some ios exclusive apps. And I honestly dont do anything remotely interested to the police to worry about it. Yet it…
I would try running an app from Xcode (which instructs it to never lock). While the app is in the foreground I don't think it should lock…
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#243This 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.
> GrapheneOS was ahead of the curve there
Not really. Samsung was the first with this, but their reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with security. It was because their phones slowed down over time and their solution was to give users the option to reboot it at specific intervals. You could even make the argument that the Samsung solution is still the superior solution because you get to set the interval.
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#244This 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
Typical lazy Ars reporting. The feature originates from GrapheneOS, not iOS.
No, the feature first appeared on Samsung phones to fix their bloat / slowdown issues. Now it’s suddenly a security feature.
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#245sounds good as opt-in configurable feature, but like it could have unforeseen consequences if forced on all users?
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#246What if just while that occurs I need to make or receive an emergency call? Sometimes it feels like tech is going backwards. Rather than rebooting, just develop a proper method to unload/uncache, without making a device useless while that happens. Or use that multicore arch to swap the “dirty” instance with a clean one, in realtime.
I was wondering about this too, or even benign annoying situations like you were doing research and forgot it was going to reboot on schedule and now you lose your train of thought
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#247Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, it could also be seen the other way around; it's a potential way for Google to force deployments of system updates (potentially at the request of law enforcement). With an automatic reboot, then the update can automatically be applied without user action.
They should really implement a dual user / dual password system to combat those countries. If you enter password 1 it goes into your normal account, if you enter password 2 it goes into another user account with a burner environment where you can install a few token commonly used apps for plausible deniability. The existence of password 2 should be optional and you should not be able to tell if the system has one or…
> install a few token commonly used apps for plausible deniability
It's gonna be seen as pretty implausible when you don't have constant & recent messages with your loved ones in there.
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't seem like it. I remember when Samsung ads mocked Apple for the camera notch and removing the headphone jack. For obvious reasons those ads are long gone...
Sure, but my point is that blaming Apple for another brands decision to follow is just weird.
Fair point. It's a frustrating pattern that seems to repeat, and I think partially it stems from when other brands are too thick to understand why people are choosing the competitor.
Web browsers are an immediate example that comes to mind. When everyone started switching to Chrome, the other browsers fell all over themselves to strip down into minimalism, as though it was the sparse UI that was capturing users' hearts, as opposed to the rendering speed and compatibility. So then you had all these other fat, slow browsers that took away the only thing that was still distinguishing them from Chrome.
In this case though, I guess it's about money. Why put in an SD card slot when you can instead extort your customers for a cloud storage subscription or a lucrative upsale to the higher model with more storage?
Meanwhile as a customer nothing makes me more irate than "upgrading" to something that's worse because I can't replace the battery and the OS no longer gets updates.
Re: Android phones will soon reboot themselves after sitting unused for three days
#250How about instead of patching up our societies with technology we vote for the right people / laws for once?
If you vote for the wrong people (i.e. people that want a more humane society), the billionaires will simply coup the government. Remember: they own the things that keep society running, so they have real power. We run the things that they own, so we also have power when combined together.