With 2.5 billion users worldwide, Google has a responsibility to make its Android os as secure as possible. But the company has at times struggled to sufficiently vet apps in the Google Play Store, permitting malicious programs through that thousands or millions of users go on to download. With Google’s release of the Android 11 Beta on Wednesday, though, the business is taking steps to make it harder for rogue apps to grab your information, even when they do slip by.
Google has actually worked for years to incrementally tighten Android security under the hood. And the release of Android 11 is especially focused on broadening privacy enhancements, to give you more control over what your apps can access, and offering more ways to distribute software updates throughout Android’s fragmented and disjointed device population.
Android 10 addressed a few of this as well, requiring that app developers demand permissions and then reaffirm user choices more often. Android 11 includes a feature that allows designer to request one-time authorizations for things like the microphone, cam, or place as an option to all or absolutely nothing. You can share your area with a friend through a chat app once, for instance, without approving indefinite place gain access to or needing to remember to wade back into settings to revoke the approval later.
” We can see that individuals are in fact leveraging these features from Android 10 and considering their choices when they’re giving apps access to consents,” says Charmaine D’Silva, an Android item supervisor who deals with personal privacy. “So developing on that this time, we have actually added a lot more controls.”
Android 11 will also check apps that you d