New Google Play Store update is now live
Android 15 is now live on Pixel phones—but one of its best new features has been missing until now. As Google works to narrow the security and privacy gap between Android and iPhone, this could be one of its biggest moves yet to change the game for millions of its users.
Live threat detection was one of the standouts when Android 15 was trailed earlier this year. Using on-device AI, the idea is that users will be warned in real time if an app is exhibiting potentially malicious behavior, before it’s flagged across the board by Play Protect.
When announcing the update, Google explained that live threat detection “will analyze additional behavioral signals related to the use of sensitive permissions and interactions with other apps and services. If suspicious behavior is discovered, Google Play Protect can send the app to Google for additional review and then warn users or disable the app if malicious behavior is confirmed.”
Now it’s here. In a blogpost on Wednesday, Google confirmed that “live threat detection with real-time alerts in Google Play Protect are now available on Pixel 6+ devices and will be coming to additional phone makers in the coming months.”
Android 15’s new live threat detection is here
It’s a gradual launch as the new technology essentially trains on real data and app behaviors in the wild. Clearly, the more malicious apps that are intercepted the more powerful the AI will become. “At launch,” Google says, live threat detection will focus on stalkerware, code that may collect personal or sensitive data for monitoring purposes without user consent, and we will explore expanding its detection to other types of harmful apps in the future.”
There was also a reminder that this new feature will operate privately, without any user data leaving the device. “All of this protection happens on your device in a privacy preserving way through Private Compute Core, which allows us to protect users without collecting data.” Users will now have the ability to delete apps behaving badly before any wider warnings have been issued.
Google has been battling malicious apps in Play Store as well as those sideloaded from third-party stores and directly installed from the web. Play Protect now works across all apps from any source, albeit Google is pushing users more to its official store than it’s done before. Google is also reducing the number of apps making their way onto Play Store in the first place, clearly raising the quality hurdle and eradicating a raft of higher risk apps in the process.
Android 15’s new scam detection
Live threat detection isn’t the only new Android 15 to launch this week. Google has also announced its slightly controversial scam call detection, which uses “powerful on-device AI to notify you of a potential scam call happening in real-time by detecting conversation patterns commonly associated with scams. For example, if a caller claims to be from your bank and asks you to urgently transfer funds due to an alleged account breach, Scam Detection will process the call to determine whether the call is likely spam and, if so, can provide an audio and haptic alert and visual warning that the call may be a scam.” Again this leverages on-device AI to bring power new levels of security and privacy.
Scam call detection is also rolling out first to Pixels, specifically to “English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users in the U.S. with a Pixel 6 or newer device.”
Samsung Galaxy owners might be watching on with some envy at these new updates. The parallel headlines speculating as to when it might launch its own Android 15 beta are doing the rounds again this week, with no chance of a stable release before next year and the launch of the S25 series. It’s becoming harder for Samsung to compete with Pixels for the pace and scale of updates given Google’s control of both hardware and software, something we will watch with interest over the coming months.