Play Protect information is injected into device privacy settings on Android 13
It’s been almost a year since Google started sharing all the changes bundled in monthly updates to the Google Play system on Android. We’ve already seen a few this month, starting with improvements to Google Kids Space. Later, Google added new Wear OS features, followed by alerts for compromised passwords. We now have a few more to check out, as new features related to the Play Store and Play Protect are starting to hit smartphones near you.
First, Google talks about wanting to help users make better decisions about installing apps. To that end, it expands on the information shown in Play Store listings details – although the company won’t say specifically what’s changing, and we haven’t spotted anything yet. It’ll probably be something like a few details related to permissions or changing requirements – we’ll keep an eye out for exactly what’s new here.
Perhaps a bit more interesting is that Google says you can use your phone to check the status of app installs happening on the rest of your devices. We’ve seen work in progress for some time now to make the Play Store more useful for managing apps across all your hardware, and this seems like the perfect next step. Running the latest Google Play and Play Store v32.4 system update, we don’t see any obvious progress bars for remote installs, so there may be a server-side switch that Google still needs to push. Once it gets here, it should be much more convenient to track app downloads and installs across all your connected devices.
Finally, on phones running Android 13, Google informs us that Play Protect security information will appear on the security and privacy settings page tucked away in the Settings app. In case you notice a bit of a theme here, it’s another change that seems to have been announced before it actually went live, but we’ll keep looking. There isn’t much of September left, but we plan to share any other new features that arrive before the first October Google Play system update.