Android updates may soon require less user interaction, offering up a significant speed boost.
According to a commit (a chunk of new code or modification of current code) added to the Android Gerrit, an online collaboration tool for managing the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) suggests Google is working on a new feature called ‘Resume on Reboot.’ Spotted by XDA Developers, the feature would allow certain phones to complete the update process without requiring a manual unlock.
Currently, Android updates will reboot a user’s device to complete the installation (or to switch partition, depending on the device). After the reboot, users have to manually unlock their device — a step added for security purposes — before it can finish the update by optimizing apps to work properly with the new software.
In other words, if you update your phone, the process doesn’t finish until you unlock the device, regardless of how long you wait.
Resume on Reboot should fix that by storing login information and unlocking the device automatically for you. This would allow the update to finish without interaction from the user. According to the commit, the feature relies on a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) called IRebootEscrow to perform the unlock securely.
Not every Android phone has the required HAL, unfortunately, so Resume on Reboot won’t be a universal Android feature. The commit details indicate that Google is testing it on a Pixel 4 at the moment, and it should come to the public in a future update.
Source: Android Gerrit Via: XDA Developers, Android Police
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