Category: Android P

Although we are still weeks away from the first Developer Preview of Android P, more details of what will be in the next major release of the platform continue to come to light.  The latest is native support for iris scanning for biometric security.

A new commit points to iris identification to be supported within P, something that manufactures like Samsung have added to their devices.  This change should make it much easier for manufactures to add iris security support to their devices and it should be more reliable.

Yesterday I posted on the discovery of a code commit in Android P that prevents idle apps (those running in the background) from gaining access to your phone’s camera.  This is a security measure and one that, until this point, Android hasn’t properly addressed.  Now it seems there is a new commit that limits access to your phone’s microphone too.

The new commit has strikingly similar language to that of the commit found yesterday.

If a UID is in an idle state we don’t allow recording to protect user’s privacy. If the UID is in an idle state we allow recording but report empty data (all zeros in the byte array) and once the process goes in an active state we report the real mic data. This avoids the race between the app being notified aboout (sp) its lifecycle and the audio system being notified about the state of a UID.

This commit, like the one yesterday, essentially cuts off any app trying to gain access at a base level within Android.

A new commit in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit suggests that a change could be coming to the LTE signal bars in Android P.  The commit suggest that carriers would be able to manipulate how this is displayed on devices to be more specific to them an not quite as generic as they are today.

Before the conspiracy theorists out there start to percolate, let’s be clear:  The carriers would not be able to hide the signal strength bars nor manipulate them in a why that gives false information.  Google doesn’t allow that to happen already and has reinforced it with other commits for Android P.  No, this change would give carriers the ability to change how the LTE bars are displayed to be more accurate for their coverage in a specific area.

Reading much into code commits in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit is risky business, much like it is for the Chromium Gerrit for Chrome OS.  But it all indications are that the next major release of Android, Android P, is getting ready to hit the Developer Preview 1 stage.

A new commit simply states The future is now (2018 edition) and diving deeper into the platform Bionic, there is complete file structure that suggests everything is ready for a build of Android P to be completed.

While we are still a few months away from seeing a developer preview, work is steadily going happening on Android P.  There is one change however that could impact developers who are accessing hidden APIs in Android.  It looks like access to them is going to be blocked in P.

A new commit in the Android Release gerrit suggests that access to hidden APIs will be blocked, forcing developers to use the approved APIs in the release.

The following patch enforces the hidden API blacklist, preventing access to boot class path methods/fields marked by the `hiddenapi` tool using static linking, reflection and JNI.

This could require some developers to rework their apps if they want them to work on Android P.

Let the Android P name guessing begin!  It is 2018 and while Google hasn’t firmly committed that there will be a version 9.0 of Android, it is pretty much a given that we will see it late this year and likely will see the first beta builds as soon as May, around Google I/O.

The question, as it is every year, is what will the official name of Android P be when it is released?  Well, we may have gotten a hint.  Or not.  Who knows?  There is a new commit in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) Gerrit that refers to “Pi”, which is likely the internal name for Android v9.0.