Android 15 makes it harder for thieves to resell stolen phones

Android’s Theft Detection Lock started rolling out in June with a wider rollout earlier this month, but today Google is making it even better with additional features in Android 15. If you were unaware that Theft Detection Lock even existed, that’s not surprising. It’s not exactly one of the more exciting features of Android and it’s not something that’s immediately user-facing like new homescreen features tend to be.

That being said, it’s a feature that most users should become familiar with. It’ll help you become better prepared for what to do if your phone is ever stolen. For instance, if your phone gets snatched, Theft Detection Lock uses AI to sense motion commonly associated with theft and locks the screen. This way thieves don’t have immediate access to your data. The device can also be automatically locked if excessive failed attempts are made to authenticate.

With Android 15, Google is expanding the helpfulness of Theft Detection Lock with the addition of authentication requirements for settings that thieves tend to go after.

Theft Detection Lock in Android 15 now requires authentication to turn off Find My Device

Find My Device and the Find My Device Network are great tools for any user to help locate a device that’s been misplaced. Unfortunately, thieves know how useful this is and tend to target it by disabling the feature. Making it harder for you to locate the phone and easier for them to resell it. Starting with Android 15, a new authentication requirement will be in place to prevent turning this off. So if your device gets stolen, thieves will still need to authenticate if they want to turn the feature off.

Google says that accessing this setting to turn it off will now require either a biometric authentication or the entry of a PIN or password. While not impossible to bypass, it’ll be a lot harder for the average thief to get around these protections. Another new authentication requirement being added is for removing your SIM.

Device resets become harder, ‘Identity Check’ coming later this year

When a thief steals your phone, the intention is to probably sell that device to make some quick cash. However, that’s a lot harder to do without being able to factory reset the device. With the new Theft Detection Lock improvements it will now be harder to perform a device reset without the device’s Google account credentials. This and the other features are most certainly useful, but of course, not foolproof. That being said, these are also meant, at least in part, to be deterrents for thieves as devices won’t be as easy to crack and resell.

Google mentions another feature coming later this year that should help add to these deterrents called Identity Check. This feature will be opt-in so it won’t be on by default. If enabled, however, biometric authentication will be needed to access a variety of Google account and device settings. This includes things like disabling the theft protection or changing the PIN. This authentication requirement also kicks in if someone is trying to access your passkey from a location that isn’t trusted.