Software unused after a few months will lose access to sensitive features unless exempted
In December, Google plans to have app runtime permissions expire on older versions of Android for apps that haven’t been opened for several months, extending the availability of a privacy protection feature introduced in Android 11. «In Android 11, we introduced the permission auto-reset feature,» explained Google software engineers Peter Visontay and Bessie Jiang in a blog post on Friday. «This feature helps protect user privacy by automatically resetting an app’s runtime permissions – which are permissions that display a prompt to the user when requested – if the app isn’t used for a few months.» That behavior is the default in Android 11 and in Android 12, expected in a few weeks. Come December, it will become the default in older versions of Android that rely on Google Play services, specifically Android 6 (API level 23) through Android 10 (API level 29). The behavior change is likely to affect about 2bn devices, given that only about 25 per cent of the 3bn active Android devices run Android 11 (API level 30) or greater, and a relatively tiny number run something older than Android 6.
