If you don’t unlock your Android device for three straight days, it will now automatically restart.
Why? Because it will make it harder for bad actors, such as a thief, to break into your device. We believe the feature will also make it harder to sell stolen phones.
In the latest Google Play services v25.14 update released earlier this week, Google rolled out a new feature under Security and Privacy, as first noticed by TechCrunch.
“[It enables] a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days,” the update reads, while noting that this is a new feature for Android smartphones.
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Rebooting your smartphone may not seem like an important security function, but it is. After a user unlocks their device, some encrypted data becomes decrypted and easier to access on subsequent unlocks. In fact, as Mashable previously noted when Apple launched a similar feature called “inactivity reboot” last year, law enforcement often depends on an iPhone being in this state in order to crack into the device for forensic investigations.
However, if a device is turned off and then back on or is simply restarted, the smartphone enters a “Before First Unlock” state. Once in this state, everything on the device is encrypted and the device is much harder to break into without the user’s password.
Apple and now Google have good reasons to do this for their customers. Devices in “Before First Unlock” state make it much harder for thieves to resell stolen smartphones on the black market. It also makes it much more difficult for bad actors to steal user data off a stolen device and weaponize it for more nefarious purposes.
As most customers use their smartphones on a daily basis, putting a timeframe on an automatic reboot to get the device back into a “Before First Unlock” state makes sense.
