Google has rolled out an update to its Advanced Protection program, which will now have Play Protect always on and limits the number of third-party apps from outside the Play Store that can be loaded onto devices.
Advanced Protection is used for personal as well as a business account for anyone who is at the risk of targeted attacks, including journalists, activists, business moguls and other prominent or threatened individual or a group of people.
Following the update, Advanced Protection will ensure that Google Play Protect, which scans apps for malware and other threats on the Android Play Store, will be automatically switched on — and will remain enabled — on all devices that have a Google account enrolled in the Advanced Protection program.
The update will also block a majority of apps that aren’t available on Play Store from being installed on a device with Advanced Protection-enrolled Google account. Though, users will still be allowed to install apps not available on Play Store if they were pre-installed on the device or through Android debug bridge. Any apps that are installed on such a device won’t be removed and can be updated.
G Suite users enrolled in the Advanced Protection program won’t get these updates currently but similar protection safeguards are already available as a part of the endpoint management for them.
These updates will be rolled out gradually, starting today for all Google accounts enrolled in the Advanced Protection program.
The company also announced that they’d be releasing new malware protections for Chrome later in 2020, which will build on download protections announced by the company in 2019.
Google has also been working on making their apps more accessible and in the latest update to Google Translate will let users transcribe and translate speech-to-text using the Translate Android app in eight different languages — English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. You can learn more about the transcribe feature update for Google Translate and how to use it in our article here.
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