Does anyone here know? It seems like Google has the equivalent of Apple’s Lockdown Mode, and I do have it enabled on my Google Pixel.
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Google doesn’t have an equivalent to ADP, their cloud stuff is all not E2EE iirc.
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Ah, I see. That’s good to know for reference’s sake. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Google doesn’t have an ADP equivalent since their business model is different from Google’s.
Did you delete my previous post?
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I deleted mine because I misread your question and then it deleted your reply.
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Google Workspace for business/enterprise has client-side encryption for some of their suite of products including Google Drive: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/new-client-side-encryption-partners
Google also seems to have offered client-side encrypted Android backups since 2018/Android 9 Google Online Security Blog: Google and Android have your back by protecting your backups (with a snapshot externally audited by NCC Group too).
Apple seems to have taken until 2022 to implement client-side encryption for iCloud backups/iOS backups, but of course is a lot more consumer focused in its offering. True enough though, Google don’t have an equivalent to Advanced Data Protection.
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isn’t pixel’s ADP just switching to Grapheneos?
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ADP is for the cloud.
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The main difference was that Apple’s solution is a true device backup, while Android’s cloud backup is a huge joke that doesn’t store much of anything unfortunately. Most Android apps choose to opt-out, or don’t store any data locally in the first place that would be included in these backups, because they store it in Google’s separate unencrypted cloud services for sync purposes.
Google’s version of Android backup is basically equivalent to adb backups to the cloud, and adb backups have always been notoriously useless.
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Well not offering E2EE Google does have this that you might want to consider:
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I already have it enabled on my account. Not sure how that’s the equivalent to Apple’s ADP.
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Afaic, they do not, and (Imho) most likely never will (unless market pressure or regulators force them to).
Google’s business model is surveillance capitalism. Offering an equivalent to lockdown mode (mostly a security feature) doesn’t conflict with that, but offering an equivalent of ADP (which greatly improves privacy) makes it harder for Google to harvest your personal data as easily. Maybe I’m being overly cynical but I don’t expect they will voluntarily give users a feature like that.
No. GrapheneOS doesn’t provide anything remotely equivalent to ADP. This is one of the things that drove me move from GOS to iOS after being a lifelong Apple critic (I still am in most ways).
It feels like a luxury to have effortless E2EE that just works, mostly without tradeoffs or having to ‘settle’ or jump through hoops. I still have hope that someday GOS + Proton could fill that gap adequately.
While not offering E2EE Google does have this that you might want to consider:
The acronym sounds similar but, afaiu, the feature is totally different and and unrelated to Apple’s ADP. (I’m sure you are aware of this already, I’m just stating it explicitly to make sure there is no confusion, since mentioning it in a thread about an Android alternative to ADP implies that it is similar to ADP).
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GOS and Proton are probably about as close as it gets. It would be a nice partnership if GOS and Proton collaborated on tighter integration and enhancing privacy/security when using GOS with its services.
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It isn’t but it does offer some features that lock down your Android phone more so in a way comparable with Lockdown mode which you asked initially.
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On one hand: Google not having anything comparable to ADP is big sad.
But on the other hand, could we really trust them with something like that?
Even Apple has had issues in the UK with this, but at least they just disabled it entirely instead of tossing the keys to UKGOV.
As Jonah said, you also need to have apps universally play ball with this and provide useful data for backups. That’s the upside of operating under the iron fist of Tim Apple - universal data handling.
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