Over the past few years, Android OS has offered protection against malicious or spam applications. Google Play Store has a built-in Google Play Protect feature that automatically removes malicious third-party apps from the Play Store listing. Still, malicious apps end up finding their way on users’ smartphones.
Many times unknowingly users access data from shady websites, and Play Protect is not able to detect the malicious nature of such apps. Therefore, we usually see a caution message, before installing such apps and also an option of removing such potentially harmful apps.
However, even then one can occasionally miss a threat, and install spyware or malicious app which can access data on your smartphone. So, starting with Android 15 beta, the newest version of Android, Google aims to solve this problem by potentially introducing a powerful new feature called “Quarantine Apps”.
How the feature may work
The app quarantine feature was discovered by Mishaal Rahman via Android Authority, and he pointed out that all the apps automatically put in the list of this system permission section will have several restrictions.
For starters, these apps will have no notification access, all their background activities will be stopped, they won't have system permissions and more. Also, Google could quarantine the apps manually, as the security measure seems to be intended more as an automated half-step between manual removal and tracking background data.
These apps will be visible on the Android 15 settings page, and all of their broadcast permissions from other system apps will be denied. The app quarantine feature was first spotted in an Android 14 beta update in late 2022. However, Google hasn't confirmed whether the feature will be rolled out with Android 15 or not. We can expect to know more about Android 15 at Google's annual developer conference in May.
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