- Google Personal Safety is reducing support for older versions of Android, but you shouldn’t be worried.
- Pixel phones will not be impacted by this change.
It’s a big, scary world out there, but who better to have your back than your trusty smartphone? Android users have been able to relax a little under the watchful eye of Google’s Personal Safety app for a few years now, managing emergency contact info, prompting safety check-ins, and even automatically detecting car crashes. Initially a Pixel-exclusive feature, we eventually saw Personal Safety come to other companies’ phones, as well. But now Google’s narrowing availability just a bit, as it stops preparing certain Personal Safety releases for older hardware.
If you still think of Personal Safety as exclusively for Pixel phones, we would not blame you. We first learned of work towards possibly expanding it to third-party phones about two years ago, but by the time that actually happened, it didn’t attract much attention. These days, Google maintains three variants of its Personal Safety app: one for older Pixels, one for the Pixel 4 and newer, and one for third-party OEMs. But now, all of a sudden, the most recent builds for those latter two variants have graduated from support for Android 10+ to Android 12+.