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Interestingly, it could also be seen the other way around; it's a potential way for Google to force deployments of system updates (potentially at the request of law enforcement). With an automatic reboot, then the update can automatically be applied without user action.

I can only second this. I have an old iPhone with a second sim-card, because I need it from time to time. And Apple introduced this auto-reboot a bit earlier, iirc last year. The problem is that after rebooting it also disconnects from wifi, so e.g. SMS/handoff synchronization stops working until you enter a passcode. This is very annoying because it was very convenient for me to receive calls/SMS to my main iPhone.

It’s a good and reasonable feature, especially if for some reason you are afraid of state or security agencies in a place where you live, or maybe during travel. It’s still questionable, because in some states you can indeed go to jail if you don’t unlock. Yet, I really want to be able to turn it off for use-cases like mine.

It's good to be able to disable this option: I use old Android phones as servers and don't want them to reboot every 3 days.

> in a lot of shitty countries, even some pretending to be democratics, not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished. If I'm not wrong, there was a guy that had to stay years in jail until he would comply with the judge order to unlock his device.

This sounds a lot like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 in the United Kingdom, where several people have been prosecuted and imprisoned for failing to provide encryption keys.

This is super annoying on newer iOS for device that I use purely for development. Before it was possible just keep iPhone unlocked indefenitely, but now it reboots and boom I have to use TouchID again.

This is again Apple being Apple making things harder without option to disable it even when development mode is on.

Has anyone found a way to bypass it?

Stories about airport security and officers demanding access your phone is one of the reasons I will never come to the US.

An (Italian) friend of mine was stuck in Newark for 8 hours after he refused access to his phone, dragged in some room and questioned for hours along his wife while split from him own kids, even though he later gave them the password (he initially said no because he thought it was out of the line, he had nothing to hide). He left for Italy 16 hours later despite being free to go.

Land of the free my ass. Disgusting police state pseudo democracy.

I don't get the difference. Today after 72 hours (3 days) my phone asks me for my password and won't accept biometrics. Also, this is a problem for all the people that use them as alarm clocks. I use Alarm Clock Xtreme for example.

For this use case there needs to be a reasonably quick way to erase/permanently lock a phone. Or maybe it needs to be something that is both 1. Less severe than that 2. Secure against personal inducements 3. More automatic.

So maybe something like a paired app with a friend/someone who is beyond the reach of the authorities, and if the phone isn't unlocked in a given definable period (or it can be triggered immediately), it then can't be unlocked without that person's active cooperation.

That's off the top of my head, so I'm sure there are optimizations.

>not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished

And to your point, I believe it's now the case in the U.S. that you can be legally compelled to unlock a fingerprint lock, but not a pin for whatever reason.

> because in a lot of shitty countries, even some pretending to be democratics, not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished

What's your point? That because it isn't useful in every country, it's not worth making available to any countries?

It's not preventing you from providing your password.

You started by saying it's a good option to have, so I don't understand the point of your second paragraph.

I was thinking this would be the final death knell to using an (unrooted) Android phone as a cheap home server. But then again, not sure if that was even possible before with all the "battery protection" logic built into Android.

Heh, my first thought was “Don't they do this already?”, but apparently GrapheneOS was ahead of the curve there. Nice.

Huh, I have GrapheneOS and I never noticed it rebooting. (And when i manually reboot, the "BIOS" prevents it from booting without acknowledging that I'm aware it's a non-Google OS, so how does it work?)

> This is a Google Play Services update

As the GrapheneOS docs note, the feature is better implemented in init and not in system server or the app/services layer like Google has done here? Though, I am sure Google engs know a thing or two about working around limitations that GrapheneOS developers may have hit (in keeping the timer going even after a soft reboot, where it is just the system server, and the rest of the userspace that depends on it, that's restarted).

Samsung has also had this feature for ages.

Same here, using several old androids as hotspots here and there. They stopped receiving updates long ago though, so I'm not worried.

You should be able to switch this off, if you notice it being enabled, so (now you know about it) it should be a one-time downtime.

I used to do something similar for the security cams at my desert property.

Picked up a gl.inet x300b off ebay and never looked back.

As the article alludes to, Apple recently shipped the same policy to iOS so this is likely just following the precedent from them. Android developers don't pay attention to community forks.

I would guess the more likely inspiration would be Apple recently adding this to iOS, if GrapheneOS had it for years and they didn’t add it...

I'd claim that Microsoft pioneered this time limit security concept with Windows 95 almost 30 years ago.

They went with 2^32-1 milliseconds or about 49.7 days.

We don't talk enough about Microsoft's strong legacy of security innovations, IMHO.

Can you set the time to one minute?

A wipe seems extreme. An unexpected trip to the hospital could leave someone with a wiped phone when they come to.

The WIPE is doable with a custom "management app", which has the permission to wipe the phone. Maybe such a thing already exists.

Everything except a very minimal core is kept on an encrypted partition. Until the password is provided, most things can't launch.

A phone sitting idle is very unusual though, a very edge case

I don't think those would be likely to have Play Services, though.

Or if you're primarily reachable by an app that can't launch until AFU, the phone reboots silently and you don't realize it, and you're incommunicado.

Some time later, you need to do something on the phone, you unlock it, the app starts up, and a flood of messages pours in. Wow, some of those would've been really useful to receive in a timely fashion! Whoops!

Locking the SIM is considered part of the feature on GrapheneOS AIUI

This won't help those of us living in countries where "elected" officials elect themselves. We haven't had a single honest election in decades (and probably won't ever have one), so measures like this are better than nothing.

Does passing laws against a crime/overreach completely stop it happening?

How about both?

The "right people" aren't represented by either side of America's bipartisan system. Good luck with your mass popular movement.

This feudal system is too oppressive! Let’s put a good king on the throne!

They keep them plugged in

Android ships a feature called bootchart which you can use to prove that most of the time your phone spends booting.. it is actually far from bottlenecked on storage or compute - bugs to be fixed; not worked around with even more complexity. Heck, some phones do not even stop playing their vendors fancy animated logo when they are finished before the animation is.

Google locking features behind the closed source, proprietary Play Services is "more reason to move to AOSP"?

No notifications? Depends on what your definition of "asking it" is, but having to explicitly do an action to check for notifications and even phone calls seems counter-productive for a phone.

Inert software. Inertware?

This is a terrible idea for an internet connected device.

Good software

Not shit software

It’s pretty well spelled out in the article…

The BFU state is more secure than AFU.

Just be glad it’s not windows, which does it every 3 hours.

For when it's sitting in an evidence baggy in the police station connected to a charger waiting for forensics

It's very clearly explained in the article.

That "something" is at least the entire userspace, so any attempt at doing so ends up being UX-equivalent to a full restart - while having a decent chance of leaving unintended trace data lying around in memory.

A full restart guarantees that everything will be wiped.

The system is provably fully encrypted after a restart.

Not really.

Restart - simple with known and predictable effects, data no longer accessible, all secrets flushed no matter where they were or cached.

Turn off disk encryption, suspend all running services, overwrite all secrets in the O/S wherever they are, and then restore all that on entering password. Probably can't do anything about secrets cached by actual apps. Complex, hard to maintain and probably buggy.

It’s not just the RAM. Android devices and iOS devices are not that secure after first unlock (AFU).

https://blogs.dsu.edu/digforce/2023/08/23/bfu-and-afu-lock-s...