Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Personal Safety is reducing support for older versions of Android, but you shouldn’t be worried.
- Pixel phones will not be impacted by this change.
It’s a big, scary world out there, but who better to have your back than your trusty smartphone? Android users have been able to relax a little under the watchful eye of Google’s Personal Safety app for a few years now, managing emergency contact info, prompting safety check-ins, and even automatically detecting car crashes. Initially a Pixel-exclusive feature, we eventually saw Personal Safety come to other companies’ phones, as well. But now Google’s narrowing availability just a bit, as it stops preparing certain Personal Safety releases for older hardware.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
If you still think of Personal Safety as exclusively for Pixel phones, we would not blame you. We first learned of work towards possibly expanding it to third-party phones about two years ago, but by the time that actually happened, it didn’t attract much attention. These days, Google maintains three variants of its Personal Safety app: one for older Pixels, one for the Pixel 4 and newer, and one for third-party OEMs. But now, all of a sudden, the most recent builds for those latter two variants have graduated from support for Android 10+ to Android 12+.
Honestly, this is probably going to have no impact on the vast majority of Personal Safety users. Pixel users will not see any of its effects, and third-party phones already enjoying Personal Safety access should also be running Android versions modern enough for this change not to matter. That said, in a relatively open ecosystem like Android offers, there are always going to be edge cases, and we can absolutely imagine someone out there who has shoehorned Personal Safety onto their Android 9 custom ROM phone, and are about to have a slightly annoying day.
Safety’s not just about avoiding accidents, but also keeping your digital life secure by making sure your devices are running the most robust, up-to-date software available. Maybe take Google’s lead on this one and upgrade to a phone from this decade?
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