
Google’s Advanced Protection for Vulnerable Users Comes to Android
Lily Hay Newman
created: May 13, 2025, 6:33 p.m. | updated: May 16, 2025, 3:02 p.m.
For years, Google has offered a program for a similar demographic called Advanced Protection that focuses on adding additional layers of monitoring and security to vulnerable users' Google accounts, a core piece of many people's digital lives that could be devastating if compromised.
Now, Google is extending Advanced Protection with a suite of features for Android 16.
On Tuesday, the company announced an Advanced Protection mode for phones running the newest version of Android.
Advanced Protection on Android is meant to be as usable and flexible as possible, though, leaning on Google's rapidly expanding on-device AI scanning capabilities to provide monitoring and alerts without having to completely eliminate features.
The feature, which debuted for Google's Pixel line and is starting to be adopted in processors on other devices, is a hardware security protection related to how a system manages its memory.
3 weeks, 4 days ago: WIRED