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As expected, the Android team has released the November set of Android Security Update patches to manufactures and Nexus devices.  This month, as has become the norm, there are three patches available, one of which is a supplemental update to one of the primary updates.  The first patch is dated November 1st and it contains many fixes around elevation of privileges, denial of service, and other security risks.  In this patch, there are two critical updates and 11 high importance updates.  This update, as has been in the past, will be for all devices running Android Nougat and Marshmallow.

With the Android Security Update for November expected to be released later today, it looks like T-Mobile is already getting it out to their customers.  If you have a Samsung Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge on the carrier, there is an update out for you that brings the security patch up to this month.  T-Mobile has always been one of the better carriers when it comes to updates but with Samsung in particular, the manufacture has been slow to get updates out to carriers.  With the Galaxy S7 lineup, this seems to have changed as updates are coming at a far more consistent increment and much sooner after they are released from Google.

Owners of the Nextbit Robin will want to check their devices for updates over the course of the next few days.  Nextbit has pushed out a series of updates for the phone, updating a system level app as well as the Camera, Gallery and Smart Storage apps.  The updates are all being pushed at the same time so once you get one, you like will see all of them.  Robin owners will get these via an OTA update.

The first and probably the one you will notice first is the Nextbit Servcies update.  This update will pop up a notification that will allow you to opt-in to have additional performance metrics about Robin to be measured.  This is 100% opt-in and is not required… but if you want to help the Nextbit team improve the software on the Robin and likely learn things for their next phone, doing so isn’t a bad thing.  No, nothing you do on your phone is tracked, it is all anonymous data.

If you are a member of Hilton HHonors and use their Android app, there is a nice update coming your way.  The latest build of the app, version 2.9.3 for those keeping score, brings a handful of improvements but likely the one that will get everyone’s attention is the improvements around Fingerprint Authentication.  For a while now the HHonors app has had fingerprint support but it was pretty much a one-and-done thing.  Once you signed in, it kept you signed in and you never really had to authenticate again.  Not very secure.

This update changes that.  Now you can enable the feature and you can enable a secondary feature to indicate how often you want to be required to authenticate.  You can choose to have it ask every time you fire up the app on your phone or after you have closed the app for 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes.