Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Watch Unlock on the Pixel Watch permits your smartwatch’s presence to maintain your cellphone unlocked.
- Proper now, that doesn’t work in the wrong way, and strolling away out of your cellphone gained’t robotically lock it.
- Google seems to be engaged on a “lock on disconnect” choice that will lastly supply that capacity.
Whereas there’s no assured approach to stop cellphone theft, ensuring you retain your handset locked might be the only best and simplest step you may take. Android already affords loads of methods to assist make sure that your cellphone is locked when it must be, like how Theft Detection Lock can use system sensors to acknowledge when it’s been snatched out of your fingers, and accordingly lock issues down. Right this moment we’re trying into one other growth on this course, as we spot proof for a brand new auto-lock characteristic.
An APK teardown helps predict options which will arrive on a service sooner or later based mostly on work-in-progress code. Nevertheless, it’s attainable that such predicted options could not make it to a public launch.
Pixel Watch customers can already benefit from Watch Unlock to make use of the presence of their wearable to maintain their cellphone unlocked — as long as your Watch itself is unlocked, when it’s close by and related to your cellphone over Bluetooth, you gained’t must enter your PIN or use biometrics on the cellphone.
Watch Unlock works nice for what it’s — you even get a notification in your wrist and might manually re-lock the cellphone — however to this point it’s solely actually functioned on this one course. That’s, whereas the presence of your Pixel Watch can be utilized to unlock your cellphone, we haven’t had the choice the place its absence locks your cellphone. That’s a disgrace, as a result of one thing like that might be helpful in the event you’ve acquired an particularly lengthy display timeout setting, and are fearful about unintentionally wandering off and leaving your cellphone someplace whereas it’s unlocked.
Code
Cellphone will lock when it disconnects out of your watch, like when it’s distant
Lock cellphone when left behind model 3.5.0.758720535 of the Google Pixel Watch app, we spot some new textual content strings that seem to fairly clearly describe simply that sort of auto-lock capacity. This “lock on disconnect” characteristic would search for the presence of your related Pixel Watch, and activate your display lock when that connection is misplaced.
Whereas we’re not seeing this within the app simply but, Telegram consumer nailsad_eleos was in a position to coax out an early look within the settings menu:
@nailsad_eleos / Telegram
As you may see, it’s in no way practical in the mean time, however that is at the very least the place we should always count on this management to indicate up as soon as Google’s able to share it.
Admittedly, this characteristic is perhaps a little bit of an edge case when it comes to the safety want it addresses, however we will think about that a lot of Pixel Watch homeowners would possibly nonetheless respect the peace of thoughts from this type of additional safety. We’ll let you understand if and once we’re in a position to get it working.
