Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Watch Unlock on the Pixel Watch allows your smartwatch’s presence to keep your phone unlocked.
- Right now, that doesn’t work in the opposite direction, and walking away from your phone won’t automatically lock it.
- Google appears to be working on a “lock on disconnect” option that would finally offer that ability.
While there’s no guaranteed way to prevent phone theft, making sure you keep your handset locked is probably the single easiest and most effective step you can take. Android already offers plenty of ways to help make sure your phone is locked when it needs to be, like how Theft Detection Lock can use device sensors to recognize when it’s been snatched out of your hands, and accordingly lock things down. Today we’re looking into another development in this direction, as we spot evidence for a new auto-lock feature.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Pixel Watch users can already take advantage of Watch Unlock to use the presence of their wearable to keep their phone unlocked — so long as your Watch itself is unlocked, when it’s nearby and connected to your phone over Bluetooth, you won’t need to enter your PIN or use biometrics on the phone.
Watch Unlock works great for what it is — you even get a notification on your wrist and can manually re-lock the phone — but so far it’s only really functioned in this one direction. That is, while the presence of your Pixel Watch can be used to unlock your phone, we haven’t had the option where its absence locks your phone. That’s a shame, because something like that could be handy if you’ve got an especially long screen timeout setting, and are worried about accidentally wandering off and leaving your phone somewhere while it’s unlocked.
Code
Phone will lock when it disconnects from your watch, like when it’s far away
Lock phone when left behind Looking at version 3.5.0.758720535 of the Google Pixel Watch app, we spot some new text strings that appear to quite clearly describe just that kind of auto-lock ability. This “lock on disconnect” feature would look for the presence of your connected Pixel Watch, and activate your screen lock when that connection is lost.
While we’re not seeing this in the app just yet, Telegram user nailsad_eleos was able to coax out an early appearance in the settings menu:
@nailsad_eleos / Telegram
As you can see, it’s not at all functional at the moment, but this is at least where we should expect this control to show up once Google’s ready to share it.
Admittedly, this feature might be a bit of an edge case in terms of the security need it addresses, but we can imagine that lots of Pixel Watch owners might still appreciate the peace of mind from this kind of extra protection. We’ll let you know if and when we’re able to get it working.
