Category Archives: Android Blog
Spring into action with these 9 new features for Android and Wear OS
Source: Android
Connecting all things Android at MWC Barcelona
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New ways to watch all your favorites on Google TV
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The Privacy Sandbox Beta is coming to Android
Source: Android
Matter is now available on Google Nest and Android devices
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Special delivery! New Android features this holiday season
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How Android protects you from scams and phishing attacks
Cybercriminals are targeting smartphones and tablets more than ever before. That’s because people are spending more time on their mobile devices, and they’re using them to send and store significant amounts of valuable data — like banking information, healthcare data and passwords. Cybercriminals are also targeting mobile devices because of their smaller screen sizes and frequent app and messaging notifications, which make it more difficult to verify if a sender is legitimate.
These criminals are increasingly using phishing attacks, scams and malware to obtain sensitive financial information or account passwords. In fact, during the pandemic, phishing attacks grew by 600% and became the top infection method in 2021.
Phishing attempts can come from a variety of sources like emails, text messages, voice calls and even third-party messaging apps. So it’s critical to have a layered security approach in place to defend from many angles. To help ensure we’re providing strong protection on Android, we hired a third-party security lab to evaluate our features and functionality that help protect you from scam and phishing attacks on your mobile devices. The report concluded that Android devices provide more features for scam and phishing protection than other mobile operating systems
For Cybersecurity Awareness Month, let’s take a closer look at these features and ways you can further protect your devices.
Avoid spam, scam and phishing attempts
Attackers often use text messages since they’re an easy channel to reach people. Messages by Google uses machine learning models to help proactively detect 1.5 billion spam, phishing and scam messages every month. It looks for known patterns and either diverts bad messages into the spam folder or warns you if it notices something suspicious.
Messages by Google detects 1.5 billion spam, phishing and scams messages every month.
Messages are analyzed with your privacy in mind, so they stay on your device and are never shared with anyone. You can, however, report a message to Google to help protect others. Gmail, the default email app on most Android phones, is also highly effective at flagging malicious messages, automatically blocking 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware.
Attackers today aren’t just using text messages and emails to phish for data. We’ve seen a 5x increase in the number of attacks involving phone calls, where a criminal tries to impersonate your bank or IT department to get you to hand over your credentials. Phone by Google provides multiple security defenses to help protect against attacks like these — from built-in caller ID and spam protection to Call Screen.
Get warned about bad links, downloads and apps
Many phishing and scam attempts try to get you to visit a malicious page impersonating a legitimate-looking site to enter your credentials, steal your social security number or download malware. Safe Browsing on Android protects 3 billion devices globally and helps warn you about potentially risky sites, downloads and extensions. It offers broad protection throughout your Android experience — from browsing on Chrome and other browsers to connecting to the web through social media apps
Safe Browsing helps defend you from dangerous websites and malicious files whether you're on a browser or an app.
Even if you download an app outside of Google Play, Google Play Protect checks the installation and can warn you about a harmful or malicious app. Play Protect also scans all the apps on your device every day for harmful ones, even if you’re offline.
Get notified about your Google account
On Android phones running version 7.0 and up, you can use the built-in security key for additional protection. When you or someone else tries to sign into your Google account, you’ll get a notification on your phone asking to confirm that it’s you.
And it’s always good to regularly do a Security Checkup, which you can access right from your device settings. It’ll provide personalized security tips for your account, remind you to keep your passwords up to date, and share what devices you’re currently signed in on and what apps have access to your data.
Learn more about how you and your data are safer with Google on Android devices.
Source: Android
Android 13 (Go edition): Easier to update and tailored just for you
When we introduced Android (Go edition) five years ago, we tailored our core mobile platform to power affordable phones with limited memory and storage. This need is just as pertinent today, with nearly 180 million people coming online in the last twelve months alone.
As we announce the release of Android 13 (Go edition), we’re marking a milestone, too: there are now over 250 million monthly active devices powered by Android Go.
To better serve this growing set of users, we focused on three critical qualities: reliability, usability and customization. Let’s walk through what’s new in this release.
Get direct software updates
Updating the software in a phone takes a lot of storage space, which most entry-level devices can’t afford to lose. With Android 13 (Go edition), we’re bringing Google Play System Updates to Go devices which helps ensure devices can regularly receive important software updates, outside of the major Android release. This will make the delivery of critical updates quick and simple without compromising storage availability on the device. The result is a phone that stays up to date over time — and you don’t have to wait for the next release or a software push from your phone’s manufacturer to have the latest and greatest.
Discover content just for you
Android (Go edition) has built-in intelligence that helps you get more from your phone. This release brings you the Discover feature, letting you swipe right from your home screen to see a curated list of articles and other content.
Tailor your phone’s look
Everyone should be able to adjust their phone to fit their needs and to reflect their tastes. This new release brings Material You to Android Go for the first time, so you can customize your entire phone’s color scheme to coordinate with your wallpaper. When you set your wallpaper image, you’ll see four corresponding color schemes to choose from. Besides making for a beautiful home screen, the dynamic coloring really helps make your smartphone feel unique to you.
In addition to the new features that are tailored to the needs of Go users, this update also brings some of key Android 13 features like Notification Permissions, App Language Preferences and more. Our goal with this release is to support more possibilities for the millions of current and future owners of an Android Go device. Look out for new devices launching with Android 13 (Go edition) in 2023.