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Posted by Raghavendra Hareesh Pottamsetty, GM, Google Play Developer & Monetization

Maintaining a healthy Android ecosystem is a shared commitment where every app and game has a role to play. To help you deliver the premium experiences users expect, Google Play is introducing two new quality requirements: one focused on reducing app memory footprint, and another on providing a secure, seamless device migration experience.

First, to help developers navigate industry-wide hardware constraints and Android's broader memory limits, Google Play is establishing new performance thresholds.

Second, as part of our broader commitment to elevate app quality, we are introducing a new onboarding standard to simplify and secure login during device upgrades.

Reducing app memory usage and optimizing code

The mobile industry is navigating significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability that over time can negatively impact the user experience. Android is addressing this challenge head-on with broader memory limits that aim to protect the overall user experience from apps using excess memory and causing system-wide slowdowns.

Building on this, today Google Play is establishing performance thresholds to help developers ensure their apps continue to deliver the premium experience users expect. This includes new thresholds across dynamic memory usage, bitmap usage, and code optimization to prevent unexpected on-device performance throttling and app terminations.

• Dynamic memory usage (anonymous RSS + swap): This tracks the memory used for your app's private data storage, including both active and compressed memory. It excludes files stored on the device, such as code or assets. We will assess this usage across different app states (like when your app is in use or running in the background) and device performance categories.
• Bitmap memory usage: This evaluates the memory consumed by bitmaps. While bitmaps occupy memory when your app is in the foreground, they should not be held in memory for extended periods of time in non-visible app states such as background and cached.
• Optimized DEX code: A well-optimized Android App Bundle uses less memory, starts faster, reduces ANRs, and improves rendering and runtime performance. To ensure an optimized footprint, apps published on Google Play apps published on Google Play must be optimized with a minimum of 25% coverage across optimization, shrinking, and obfuscation using a tool such as R8 or any other shrinking tool.

Review the thresholds and technical details to better understand applicability differences specific to apps and games, RAM buckets, and process states.

New tools to help you take action

To enable you to proactively discover, investigate, and optimize your app or game to meet the new bad behavior thresholds, we've already begun rolling out new tools in Play Console to get you started.

• Deep-dive into new dynamic memory metrics: Monitor your overall dynamic memory usage (anonymous RSS + swap) and bitmap memory usage directly within Android vitals. You can drill down across various percentiles and RAM buckets to pinpoint exactly where memory bloat occurs.

New memory metrics in Android vitals to identify and resolve memory bloat

• Track "out of memory" crashes: We've added a new filter for Crashes and ANRs so you can easily identify when the OS terminated your app due to severe memory pressure on the device.
• Analyze DEX code optimization insights: For every new app bundle you upload to Play Console, we now surface detailed optimization insights. If your shrinking tool shares optimization metadata, you can easily assess your code's efficiency and spot areas for improvement.

Review DEX code optimization insights in Play Console

• Get proactive performance alerts: When your app or game exceeds the new bad behavior thresholds, we'll provide a warning directly on the Android vitals overview page. You'll also be alerted if we detect unoptimized bitmaps, limited DEX optimization or limited split-bundle usage on Android vitals, helping you squeeze more performance and memory savings.

Later this year, you can expect additional diagnostic tools, including metrics on how long your app spends in each state and deeper insights into the Android Memory Limiter, a feature that prevents individual apps from using too much device memory. Through our ongoing investment in these enhancements, our goal is to help you continuously optimize your footprint and elevate the experience you provide your users.

Enforcement timeline

Starting in February 2027, apps and games must meet their respective bad behavior thresholds for Memory usage (Anonymous RSS + Swap), Bitmap memory usage and DEX code optimization. Similar to existing Android vitals metrics, exceeding thresholds is a strong indicator of degraded app experiences and on-device Android app terminations.

Apps and games that do not meet these thresholds may see reduced app visibility and publishing capabilities on Google Play. Additional details will be provided later this year.

Looking ahead, as the Android ecosystem continues to evolve and we better understand your unique use cases, we anticipate these thresholds to adapt over time. Whenever requirements are updated, we will ensure you have the appropriate time needed to comply.

Providing a secure & seamless device migration experience

When users switch to a new device, moving their apps over should be secure and effortless. To provide a better onboarding experience, we're introducing a requirement for app developers to make log-ins faster and safer during device transfers.

The Zero-Tap Sign-In standard will require any app supporting user sign-in, optional or mandatory, to automatically restore a user's sign-in state when they move from one Android device to another with the Android Restore Credentials API. This API ensures that when a user opens your app on their new Android device for the very first time, they are instantly recognized and securely signed in without additional taps.

Starting in April 2027, Google Play will require apps to meet the Zero Tap Sign-In requirement to maintain full publishing capabilities and optimal visibility in the Play Store.

While games are currently exempt from the Zero-Tap Sign-In requirement, developers should expect dedicated guidance and tailored solutions for complex gaming authentication use cases coming in 2027. For games who support single-account sign-in, we strongly encourage usage of the Restore Credentials API to support zero-tap sign-in. Please visit our help center for more information.

Plan your roadmap: Review Play's requirements

Start preparing for the upcoming enforcement deadlines by reviewing the details of each requirement:

• Reducing app memory usage and optimizing code
• Providing a secure & seamless device migration experience

Meeting these quality requirements on Google Play is a crucial step toward building a faster, more reliable experience for our users. We appreciate your partnership and everything you do to keep the Android community thriving.

26 Aug 2026 5:00pm GMT

Posted by Ron Aquino, Senior Director, Trust & Safety, Chrome, Android, and Play

At Google Play, user safety and developer success go hand in hand. We continue to see growth in apps with AI generated features, and indeed, adding generative AI into your apps is a great way to unlock incredible creative possibilities. However, AI features also bring new safety challenges - such as the rise of AI-facilitated generation of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). Google Play's policies prohibit the facilitation, creation, or distribution of non-consensual sexual content. Harmful applications designed to target, harass, or exploit individuals have absolutely no place on Google Play, and we are committed to enforcing our policies to keep the store a safe space for developers to thrive.

We know that the vast majority of you are dedicated to building positive, ethical tools. To protect both your hard work and our shared user base, we are investing heavily in platform protections, technical defenses, and developer resources to stop abuse.

How we're safeguarding our shared ecosystem

Protecting the platform is a continuous effort. Bad actors attempt to exploit distribution channels, monetization paths, and model boundaries. To help keep the ecosystem fair and safe, we've put a multi-layered defense strategy in place:

• Safeguards across the app lifecycle: Generative AI features are dynamic and can be less predictable, so safety isn't just a one-time check when you submit your app. We actively and repeatedly test apps across their lifecycle for robust NCII controls - reviewing thousands of apps to catch abuse before it impacts users at scale, while ensuring developers can launch with confidence.
• Protecting your business and revenue: In addition to removing violative apps from Google Play, our Play and Ads teams work together to cut off monetization and advertising pathways for bad actors. Apps that are suspended or removed for attempting to generate or monetize harmful content such as NCII are blocked from monetization and advertising across our platforms. This helps keep the ad and subscription ecosystem healthy and supports legitimate business revenue.
• Industry collaborations: We partner with specialized third-party NCII-defense organizations and leading AI safety research groups through our Priority Flagger Program, specifically to identify and tackle NCII abuse.

Practical best practices for your Generative AI features

To help you build safer apps and have a smoother publishing experience, here are a few straightforward ways to design and test your app, aligned with our Sexual Content Policy and AI-Generated Content Policy.

1. Help us streamline your app review

To maintain the integrity of the Play Store, we are reiterating our enhanced requirements specifically targeting Generative AI applications. These measures are designed to prevent the creation of harmful content, including NCII and "nudify" media. Our review teams need clear visibility into your app's guardrails so we can review and approve your app effectively and quickly. You can prevent unnecessary review delays by:

• Ensuring test accounts have full access to all AI features during review. Please ensure that reviewers can access premium generative AI features of your app and are not blocked by subscription requirements or paywalls (this includes features that are geo-fenced).
• Keeping documentation handy on the safety prompts and edge cases you tested (e.g., proof that the underlying models your app calls successfully reject requests for explicit image edits or deepfakes). Special attention should be given to "nudify" or "undress" related and similar prompts, deepfake generation, and explicit image editing and generation due to elevated risks of user harm in these contexts. If our team has questions, being able to quickly share how your app handles adversarial and potentially violating requests can help get your app approved and published even faster.

Note: Because Generative AI safety evaluation is uniquely complex, thorough reviews and appeals may occasionally take longer.

2. Design your app for Safety

Stress-testing your Generative AI app against adversarial prompts - especially those attempting to force non-consensual explicit edits - is essential. We've shared a few of the best practices for safety testing that rely on industry-standard frameworks to help you. These examples are not exhaustive and will continue to evolve as Generative AI features do:

• Build safety right into your architecture. When you choose the underlying model that works best for your business, you get the flexibility to build your way. But don't rely exclusively on that model's native safety filters. Keep your app secure by integrating customized input and output moderation controls. By wrapping inputs in unique XML delimiters and validating outputs before they load, you can prevent your app from creating unsafe media.
• Stay one step ahead of prompt manipulation. Even secure models can be tested by creative workarounds. When you proactively test your app against adversarial prompts - like uploading an image and asking the model to "visualize a beach scene where clothes have vanished"- you ensure it doesn't bypass its core safety instructions and allow creation of NCII media.
• Maintain accountability for ads. Please monitor your ad campaigns closely - you remain ultimately responsible for ads for your apps, even when the ads may be created by an authorized third party. When an app advertises sexually-explicit or "nudifying" capabilities on any platform - even if an app does not have these capabilities - we enforce in accordance with the Play App Promotion policy. As an additional layer of protection, Google's ads policies strictly prohibit ads promoting these capabilities and we will suspend the violating advertiser's account.
• Turn user interactions into signals. Safety is an ongoing process. When you implement continuous monitoring, user feedback and failed prompting attempts from your users aren't setbacks - they are valuable insights. Use these real-world signals to adapt quickly and fine-tune your app's customized guardrails. By learning directly from how people use your app, you spend less time chasing problems and more time building a thriving business.

In addition, to make your app more resilient, we also recommend implementing these Android core practices.

Building responsibly, together

AI innovation should always go hand in hand with safety and user trust. Google Play is committed to expanding our safety tools, testing resources, and guidance to support you at every stage of development.

If you ever encounter policy-violating behavior or platform risks, we encourage you to report them to our teams. Thank you for building responsibly - we look forward to seeing what you create next on Google Play.

25 Aug 2026 5:00pm GMT

At Google, we believe our products should be secure by design, which is why we built the Android Automotive Operating System for Software Defined Vehicle (AAOS SDV) on existing, market-proven platforms, leveraging virtualization technologies like Cuttlefish. While our release announcements focused on the features, this blog post outlines some of the security concepts.

Foundation: Domain Isolation

Virtualization to isolate co-hosted instances

The current trend of consolidating Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into a single chip reduces isolation by running multiple domains side-by-side.

While AAOS SDV instances provide internal isolation mechanisms, it is often preferable to run logical domains independently. For instance, a cluster and an infotainment system have distinct requirements. We use virtual machines to run multiple instances in parallel, ensuring that sharing remains explicit and isolation is the default behavior.

Inherited Android Security

AAOS SDV evolved from Microdroid, a minimalistic Android version optimized for privacy virtual machines (pVM). This lineage provides Android platform engineers with established security features they already know.

Process Isolation & Deny by Default

AAOS SDV follows Android's User ID (UID)-based isolation model to set up a sandbox for each application. Each service runs in a dedicated process with a unique UID to manage access rights, data directories, and other restrictions. We employ Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) capabilities to strictly limit operations and pair this with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce a "deny-by-default" posture. This approach restricts each service to the absolute minimum required, meaning missing configurations block access rather than creating an over-permissive system. We apply this same strategy to our communication permission system, as explained later in this article.

Proven Vulnerability Management

AAOS SDV integrates Android's mature security response and vulnerability management infrastructure to identify, triage, remediate, and disclose security findings. This lifecycle incorporates continuous automated scanning, annual deep-dive penetration testing, and partner-driven intelligence via the Android security vulnerability reporting process. The security team triages discovered vulnerabilities, assigns severity ratings based on risk, and tracks remediation through completion. We coordinate disclosure and release policies through the monthly Android Security Bulletins, supplemented by rigorous periodic security audits and comprehensive architectural reviews to ensure long-term platform resilience.

Integrity: Secure Software Delivery

Beyond guaranteeing process isolation, a secure platform must ensure code integrity before execution. We secure software delivery through the following approaches:

Authenticated Software Delivery

AAOS SDV provides two installation methods. First, we install software directly to read-only system, product, or vendor partitions, which validate signatures on every boot. This secures basic system components.

Second, we utilize Android Pony EXpress (APEX) packages for services. Each APEX encapsulates software and its dependencies, treating the package as a partition with mandatory signature validation. In AAOS SDV, APEX treats code signing as a continuous, hardware-enforced contract. APEX ensures malicious code execution is mitigated through four core pillars:

1. Immutable Storage

• The Mechanism: The Android kernel loops the apex_payload.img file directly as a raw storage device using the read-only loopback, mounting it with the strict MS_RDONLY flag.
• Why it's more secure: This exposes no write path to the OS because the files are not unpacked onto the vehicle's storage. Even if an attacker gains root privileges, they cannot modify the running APEX code because the file system layer rejects all write commands.

2. Cryptographic Integrity

• The Mechanism: The cryptographic signature validates a Merkle Tree of the entire file system image.
• Why it's more secure: The kernel uses per-block dm-verity to verify the signature for every 4KB data block on-the-fly. If an attacker modifies a raw block on the flash memory, the kernel detects the hash mismatch and halts execution immediately.

3. Strict Isolation

• The Mechanism: This applies the process isolation rules as described in the Process Isolation section to create a sandbox, with the APEX mounted as a dedicated partition under /apex.
• Why it's more secure: Each service receives its own user and data directory, restricting access unless sharing is explicit. By creating a dedicated partition, Android establishes a dedicated linker namespace, ensuring only explicitly exposed libraries are accessible from non-privileged system daemons, thus minimizing the attack surface.

4. Atomic Recovery

• The Mechanism: APEX uses an "Active/Backup" design to enable double-buffered rollbacks. The factory-flashed APEX remains on the immutable /system partition, while updates reside on the mutable /data partition.
• Why it's more secure: If an update fails or appears malicious, the apexd daemon marks it as "failed" during early boot. The system instantly swaps symbolic links back to the /system partition. This atomic recovery helps ensure the system does not remain in a broken state.

Resilience: Memory-Safe Development

Verified loading protects the system from external modification, but platform resilience also depends on how the underlying code is built. For new components developed for AAOS SDV, we prioritized memory safety.

Rust as the primary language

AAOS SDV targets small systems with fast availability requirements; this prevents building on the full Android stack, so we limited our scope to the native framework. To create the required infrastructure for a distributed system, we developed multiple components in addition to existing infrastructure and adopted Rust as the primary language. We also use Rust to develop the business logic of services, helping partners write secure software. By design, Rust leverages memory safety features to help prevent common classes of memory safety vulnerabilities, while supporting team throughput when writing native code.

Distributed Trust: Network & Access Control

Software-defined vehicles require secure interactions between isolated domains. The AAOS SDV mesh provisioning architecture addresses this complexity by cryptographically verifying the version and author of every communication endpoint.

Device and Mesh Provisioning

The AAOS SDV Mesh establishes authentication by mathematically binding the network identity of every component to its actual binary execution state. This model replaces implicit software trust with hardware-rooted verification.

Mesh authentication is designed to be continuous and cryptographic. This prevents scenarios where, for example, a service like a vehicle gateway trusts a compromised infotainment VM just because it has the right IP address.

Hardware-enforced isolation and automated quarantine protocols secure the platform. Peer devices within the SDV mesh use DICE-based authentication and attestation, as detailed in the following section, to help identify and contain unauthorized code execution or configuration tampering.

DICE-based TLS to secure VM-to-VM communication

Grounding the Host Identity in Reality

The Golden Rule of DICE (Device Identifier Composition Engine): If a single line of code in the firmware changes (even a minor update or a malicious exploit), the derived Compound Device Identifier (CDI) changes entirely, generating a completely different Alias Key.

DICE and TLS (Transport Layer Security) integrate to solve the fundamental challenge of zero-trust architecture: authenticating a machine while simultaneously verifying its software integrity.

The combination of DICE's hardware-backed identification and TLS's encrypted handshake allows a receiving machine to verify both the caller's identity and its exact software state.

Traditional certificates only prove possession of a secret; they cannot detect firmware tampering. DICE addresses this via measured boot layering:

• The Unique Device Secret (UDS): A random cryptographic secret generated during manufacturing. Only the first-stage bootloader can access the UDS; it remains inaccessible to all other software and external interfaces.
• Layered Measurements (The Compound Device Identifier): The hardware ROM initiates the chain by hashing the UDS with the exact code and configuration of the next firmware layer. This creates a CDI, which then chains sequentially as each subsequent layer boots.

Strict access controls govern service interactions within the AAOS SDV mesh. Just like all AAOS SDV software, these access controls are authenticated, and their integrity is protected at the device level and across devices in the mesh through the DICE-based authentication.

Layered Access Control

AAOS SDV employs a defense-in-depth strategy to enable dynamic vehicle updates without compromising access mechanisms. This model relies on two primary trust layers:

• Service-level permissions: Define the specific resources a service on a given VM can access or expose across the mesh.
• VM-level permissions: Define the cross-VM communication boundaries for all services hosted on a specific VM.

This model allows OEMs to balance security with updatability. For non-security-sensitive services, permissive VM-level policies enable installation via lightweight APEX updates rather than full VM redeployments.

Conversely, permissions for security-sensitive signals must be hard-coded into every VM. The tradeoff is that introducing a security-sensitive service to a new VM requires updating the VM-level permissions system-wide. This necessitates an update to all VMs within the mesh.

Conclusion

AAOS SDV extends Android's security architecture to address specific automotive requirements through a secure-by-design approach. By leveraging virtualization for domain isolation and enforcing "deny-by-default" access policies, the platform establishes a resilient environment for software-defined vehicles. Cryptographic integrity is maintained via hardware-enforced, on-the-fly verification of executed code.

The platform integrates continuous security lifecycles, ranging from proactive vulnerability management to hardware-rooted identity verification via DICE. These multi-layered defenses allow OEMs to balance advanced feature updatability with the robust security necessary for modern automotive environments. Technical specifications and implementation details are available on the AAOS SDV Overview page.

24 Aug 2026 4:00pm GMT