Android 15 could protect data and extend battery life with adaptive timeouts

Google plans to release the next major version of its Android operating system, Android 15, sometime this fall, but many of its new security and privacy features have already been revealed. These include new private spaces for sensitive apps, added protection from rogue “Stingray” devices, increased control over when your location is shared with cellular networks, and one-time passwords from notifications ( This includes automatic editing of OTP). Considering there are still four preview builds left until the stable release of Android 15, there are bound to be many more security features that are yet to be added or discovered. One such feature expected in an upcoming beta release is called Adaptive Timeout.

If you have screen lock enabled on your device (which you must do), Android automatically locks your device after a set amount of time. By default, Android turns off the screen after 30 seconds of inactivity and locks the device after another 5 seconds. You can change these thresholds by following these steps: Settings > Display > Screen timeout and [設定]>[セキュリティとプライバシー]>[デバイスのロック解除]>[画面ロックの設定], Each.

If you’re doing something that requires your device’s screen to wake up and stay unlocked, but you can’t do it, you can turn on the optional Screen Attention feature on your selected device. This feature, introduced by Google with the Pixel 4 series, “prevents the screen from turning off when you’re looking at it.” It uses the device’s front-facing camera to see if someone is looking at the screen, so as long as a face is detected in front of the screen, even if the screen is normally set to time out after 30 seconds. , the screen will remain awake.

Although Android provides users with the option to automatically extend the amount of time their device’s screen is visible through the Screen Attention feature, the OS does not provide the opposite capability. In other words, Android does not have a feature that automatically reduces the screen lighting time. However, Android 15 is set to change this with a new adaptive timeout feature.

In the Android 15 Developer Preview 2 release, I found a new “Adaptive Timeout” setting string that “automatically turns off the screen early if the device is not in use.” The feature description does not mention how the OS actually knows when the user is not using the device, but it does use the device’s front-facing camera and other presence sensors to detect it. There is likely to be.

<string name="contextual_timeout_description">Automatically turns off your screen early if you’re not using your device</string>

<string name="contextual_timeout_title">Adaptive timeout</string>

These strings can be found in the Android 15 DP2 Settings app, but the code that references these strings is com.google.* namespace. This suggests that the adaptive timeout feature will not be part of the open source version of Android (AOSP), but will be part of Google’s Android 15 build for his Pixel devices. This makes it similar to the Screen Attention feature, but since this feature also relies on Google’s Android System Intelligence app, it is not enabled out of the box in AOSP.

Adaptive Timeout in Android 15 allows the OS to intelligently turn off (and then lock) the screen when you are finished using your device, allowing you to benefit from longer screen timeouts without significantly compromising security. This also affects battery life, as a longer screen timeout means the screen is on longer and consumes more battery.