Earlier this week Google revealed some of the new features coming to Android 15 such as Private Space. The latter is indeed a private space on an Android phone where sensitive apps can be hidden from prying eyes behind the protection of a biometric lock such as a fingerprint scanner or facial recognition. Another useful and cool feature, the Theft Detection Lock, uses AI to detect when your phone has been snatched from your hands by a thief who is running away on foot, via a car, or a bicycle.
When the phone detects this series of events it will automatically lock down the device to prevent the thief from breaking into the handset. And using AI to look for patterns with permissions and how an app interacts with other apps, Android 15 will work with Google Play Protect to alert users and Google about apps that could be dangerous. If Google reviews the app and finds that it has been used to help attackers commit fraud, it will be removed from the Play Store.
At Google I/O, the company also revealed that Android 15 will increase the battery standby time by as long as three hours on some devices. Google was able to achieve this by speeding up the time that devices running Android 15 enter Doze mode by 50%. In Doze mode, the system seeks to save battery life by restricting an app’s access to system and CPU-intensive services. It also prevents apps that haven’t been used lately from running in the background. Altogether, the changes to the Doze mode help deliver the increase to the battery standby time on Android 15.
Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform told Android Authority, “For Android 15, we’ve sped up the time to doze (doze is when we go into a quiesce state) by 50%. So we get into doze 50% faster, and the result is on some devices we tested up to 3 hours longer standby power. And that’s sort of a general improvement in 15 that applies to all devices.”
This feature will also show up in Wear OS 6 which will be based on Android 15 and is expected to be released next year.