In future versions of Android, two new features could be introduced, one in the field of security and password management, and the other that would improve the management of apps in the background.
Although the second could be welcomed already by Android 13, as far as the first is concerned, the situation appears a little more complex, because much will depend on the number of third-party services that will join. Let’s find out what it is.
Goodbye to passwords: welcome passkeys!
The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is working to replace passwords due to the tendency of people to always use the same or to use too simple ones. Although two-factor authentication has mitigated these two trends a bit, Android and Google are also preparing support for passkeys.
If these are adopted, access to any web service will no longer require the entry of a password (even those that allow you to take advantage of the automatic compilation): instead, cryptographic keys will be exploited (in pairs) that will be stored on the device and on the cloud synchronization system associated with the operating system.
In the case of Android, in fact, the passkeys (which will also be called so in the Apple world) will be saved in the Google account; we know this thanks to two strings of code found within version 22.15.14 of Google Play Services:
<string name=”fido_passkey_welcome_title”>Hello passkeys, goodbye passwords</string>
<string name=”fido_passkey_welcome_text”>Passkeys provide better protection than passwords \u2013 and they\u2019re safely saved in your Google Account. <a href=%1$s> Learn more </a></string>
These two strings of code suggest that Google can give a nice boost to users, encouraging them towards the adoption of the passkey: in the first of the two you can clearly read “Hello passkey, goodbye password” and everything is accompanied by the image below.
For the user, it will be essential to know the master password of their Google account, especially and especially in case of a change of the device: the advantage, however, is that at this point it will be enough to remember a single password instead of a considerable number.
This is how the mechanism works, explained directly by the FIDO alliance:
“When registering for an online service, the user’s client device creates a new key pair. Keep the private key and register the public key with the online service. Authentication is performed by the client device that proves possession of the service’s private key by signing a dispute.”
Within the Play Services, the work is still in progress: as we said earlier, the adoption of passkeys by third-party apps and services is a great requirement for everything to materialize and spread.
Android will improve the management of background apps
Who hasn’t been there at least once? At some point in the life cycle, any smartphone, some more, some less, will begin to terminate the apps opened in the background, risking making the user lose an entire work session or interrupting the arrival of notifications.
With an upcoming update of Android, perhaps already with the advent of Android 13, the music could change thanks to a function called MGLRU (Multi-Generational Least Recently Used) and already implemented for some time in Chrome OS, within a good number of kernels between version 4.14 and 5.15.
A commit on Android Gerrit shows that Google has added this change to the GKI (Generic Kernel Image) of Android 13, while another commit, currently under review, shows that it may soon be possible to enable the feature via ADB.
Adding this functionality within Android achieves two goals:
- The CPU usage of the kswapd process (the virtual memory manager) process is reduced by 40%, freeing up a lot of space for potential processing.
- The amount of background app outages is decreased by 18%, giving a tangible benefit to end-users as well.
A Google engineer says the company has tested MGLRU on a million Android devices, pointing to the substantial improvements observed, both in terms of CPU usage and in terms of applications stopped prematurely, resulting in overall performance improvements and less lag on the user interface as well.
Although the hope is to see this feature already in Android 13, it is not clear if Google, at least initially, will start a test limited to a few beta testers of the next operating system before introducing it in the stable version.