Google’s Play Store Upgrade—Do You Need A New Phone?
All change for Play Store.
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Google is locking down Android as it narrows the security and privacy gap to iPhone. This is made harder by a fragmented ecosystem that relies on OEMs to deploy updates, and by the wide array of older and newer phones in use. But Google’s new Play Store upgrade could be the game-changer that means many of you will need a new phone.
There are now around 500 million Android phones that have fallen off support and which are vulnerable to attack without regular updates. All these phones should be upgraded to newer devices with ongoing security cover. But there are another 500 million phones still on support but which also might need to be changed.
“The Play Integrity API,” Google posted on Tuesday, “is an essential tool to help protect your business from abuse such as fraud, bots, cheating, and data theft.” The company says that “apps that use Play Integrity features to detect suspicious activity are seeing an 80% drop in unauthorized usage on average compared to other apps.”
But that API is now changing to become much more rigorous. Google is establishing a dividing line between newer and older phones, tuning “the API on all devices running Android 13 and above… to make it faster, more reliable, and more private for users.”
Google is also launching “enhanced security signals to help [developers] decide how much [they] trust the environment [their] app is running in.” This means a pre-2022 phone might not have access to an app’s full functionality, with Google telling developers their apps could respond differently to “devices running Android 12 and lower than to the enhanced definition on devices running Android 13 and higher.”
These new measures become compulsory two-months from now. According to Statcounter, around 35% of phones run Android 12 or older.
Google’s latest update also includes another warning on the dangers of sideloading, which remains the greatest threat to Android devices. “Our most recent analysis found over 50 times more Android malware from internet-sideloaded sources (like browsers and messaging apps) than on Google Play.” The Android-maker has already expanded Play Protect to assure apps from any source, and says this will now be strengthened.
If your phone is out of support, you need an upgrade — it’s just not worth the risk. If you’re running anything older than Android 13, the new changes might mean some of the app functionality you use will stop working. You’ll need a newer phone to fix that.