Google has issued its Android Marshmallow OS requirements for third party developers, and is placing an emphasis on security and power.
Power, of course, meaning battery life: The new requirements essentially stop developers from messing around with Doze, a system feature designed to ensure that battery is maximally conserved by essentially putting inactive apps into a sleep state.
Conserving battery life is a matter of increasing concern to many smartphone makers and users, but the really impactful new requirements concern security. Google is now mandating full disk encryption for new devices, though it is offering an exemption for those launched on a previous version of Android and unable to meet the requirement via software upgrades. And Google is really trying to leverage the native fingerprint biometrics capabilities of its new OS by outlining certain standards for fingerprint scanning. For example, any device or app making use of fingerprint scanning must keep its false acceptance rate at 0.002 percent or lower, and is ‘strongly recommended’ to maintain a false rejection rate no higher than ten percent.
It’s an encouraging sign of how seriously Google is taking data security, especially with the rise of mPayment platforms like its own Android Pay, which will handle increasing amounts of sensitive user data. Extending rigorous security standards to third party developers is a sign that Google seeks to have a meaningful security baseline in place across the Android ecosystem.
Source: VentureBeat
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