Android 16’s Advanced Protection could give apps some new tricks

For many people, Google accounts contain tons of sensitive personal, financial, and medical information. That’s why securing your Google account with a strong password or key is so important, and why you should be especially careful when installing applications and services and granting them permissions. If you’re particularly concerned about hackers gaining access to your data and need extra protection, you can go online and sign up for Google’s Advanced Protection program, which blocks certain features for security reasons. Next year’s Android 16 update could expand Advanced Protection a bit, allowing apps to implement additional protections when the mode is enabled.

Google announced its Advanced Protection program in 2017 to provide an additional layer of protection for people whose Google accounts contain particularly valuable data. The program is aimed at users at increased risk of hacking, such as IT administrators, journalists, activists, business executives and politicians. If you sign up for Advanced Protection, you’ll be required to use a security key or password to sign in to your Google account, you won’t be able to download files that Google Chrome flags as malicious, and you won’t be able to give unapproved (by Google) apps access your Google account details.

In early 2020, Google expanded its Advanced Protection program to include security for Android phones. Advanced Protection not only forces Google Play Protect to be turned on, but also blocks the ability to install apps from outside the Google Play Store or other pre-installed app stores. It will also warn you about apps in the Play Store that have not been approved by Google. While these restrictions largely protect the average user from installing new malicious apps, more can probably be done to protect sensitive data in existing apps. This seems to be what Android 16’s new advanced protection mode is intended to solve.

While browsing Gerrit’s AOSP the other day, I came across a patch titled “(AAPM) Introducing a new service for Android Advanced Protection Mode” While the new code in the patch itself does not reveal any information about how Android Advanced Protection Mode works, the patch description states that the service “will be used to register devices in a security-aware protection mode and allow customers to adjust behavior based on the state of that mode.” ” A Google engineer explained a bit more about what this means in the comments, stating that “the service allows users to sign up for ‘Advanced Protection’ via Settings, and for apps to check whether a user is registered via ‘AdvancedProtectionManager#isAdvancedProtectionEnabled()“api.”

Basically, Android 16 adds the ability to enable “advanced protection” in the Settings app. When Advanced Protection is active, applications can call the new API to check whether it is enabled and then adjust their behavior accordingly. It’s up to apps to decide what exactly to do when this feature is enabled, but I can imagine that apps that, say, have some additional screen lock option could enable this when Advanced Protection is enabled.

As for how I know Google is working on this feature for Android 16 and not one of the upcoming QPRs for Android 15, it’s due to small details in the new code Google adds. The new code adds a SELinux policy for the new Android Advanced Protection Mode service, but this policy only applies when the “board API” level is set to 202504, which is the vendor API level for next year’s Android 16 release. Also, the fact that it will be available new API for the app, means we need to raise the API level (and therefore the Android version) since Android 15 has already achieved platform stability. It’s possible that this new API will be limited to system apps, in which case platform stability won’t matter, but I doubt that will be the case.