Google Tries Out a New Feature on Android that Will Put Harmful Apps with Malware in Quarantine

Google Play Protect provides protection against harmful malwares and viruses to Android. But even it can miss some of the malware that can ultimately harm your Android device. In Android 15, there are some new updates and features that will automatically protect the Android from malwares in apps in a new way. This new way is by putting misbehaving or apps with harmful activities in quarantine. Mishaal Rehman, who is an AOSP code expert, says that quarantining the apps manually is not possible. So, Android 15 will have a system that will quarantine the app automatically if it detects something acting up in the app.

When in quarantine, the apps will still be visible on the home screen and among other apps. But users won’t be able to see the notifications from those apps and all the activities on the app will be stopped. The apps that will be linked to the affected app will also be not able to use services from that app. Broadcasts from other apps or systems will also not be possible when an app will be in quarantine.

To put it simply, quarantined apps will act similarly to disabled apps. Even their APIs are the same with only one extra flag added to this system. Users will have to give permission of QUARANTINE_APPS in order to put an app that is acting suspicious in quarantine. The permission will be given from Google Play Store but Play Store isn’t using it yet. The best ever Android in which quarantine feature was spotted was Android 14 QPR2 Beta 1 last year. There are some speculations that this feature may not be even in Android 15 because Google Play Stores and Google Play Services haven’t started asking for its permissions.

Image: Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World