“Today begins the rollout of Android 15 on Pixel devices,” Google announced Tuesday, announcing updates that “include security features that help protect your sensitive health, financial and personal information from theft and fraud. But one of Android 15’s most exciting new security features is MIA; We fully expected this, but as it turns out, this is due to a nasty mistake on Google’s part.

Luckily, Google has included its excellent new anti-theft protection in this release.” “We use AI to protect your data – if your phone detects that someone has snatched it from you and is trying to run, bike or drive away, your Device automatically locked. ” However, there is no news about the extent of early deployments of critical live threat detection; This uses AI to monitor app behavior on the device and identify risks as early as possible. But this will certainly be rolled out across the board when the many new features of Android 15 are activated.

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The bad news is that Android 15’s most radical security upgrade is missing. Google announced its new Mobile Network Security at its I/O event and then announced its release in beta versions of Android 15 made available to Pixels. But that was either a bug in the beta update – a settings page appeared that should have been hidden, or the hardware integration didn’t complete as planned and was scrapped.

Anyway, it turns out that even the just-released Pixel 9s don’t yet have the hardware to run this feature, which raises the question of why it was publicly announced as an Android 15 feature, leading to several media reports of it Pixel 9 launches. The current rendering suggests that Android 16 could emerge before the device hardware is capable of running this Android 15 update – all a bit pointless.

As first reported by Android Authority“Android 15’s new cellular security features are missing from Pixel phones… We have confirmed that no current Pixel phones support Android 15’s new cellular security features.” That’s a real shame, as it’s a true Google innovation was a step ahead of current iPhone features.

“Given that these features were available to Pixel users during the Android 15 beta, it is reasonable to assume that Pixel phones will support them. As it turns out, that’s not actually the case, as the visibility of the Cellular Security settings page on Pixel phones was simply a bug.”

As Android Police points out: “Although these cellular security features are part of the Android 15 source code, unfortunately they cannot be used. Their initial appearance in beta sparked speculation about support, particularly in the then-unreleased Pixel 9 series, although that is not the case.”

These new mobile network defense features will be particularly useful for users concerned about the risk of tracking and interception. They guard against rogue networks repeatedly pinging their phones for identifiers, and the risk of a phone being smuggled from a real cellular network to a local, rogue base station with limited encryption (if any), leaving the phone vulnerable to attack .

Such fraudulent networks use hardware to trick phones into thinking they are a legitimate, public cellular base station. They only work locally, sending a strong signal to a device while it scans for nearby cell towers. Once the phone switches, the fraudulent network receives its traffic. When this traffic is fully encrypted, it remains secure. However, if the fraudulent network can lower the encryption threshold, that changes.

Many Android devices allow users to disable 2G networks, which goes a long way toward protecting against the most basic such attacks, if not the more sophisticated ones. And Samsung notably doesn’t offer universal 2G switching for all of its devices – it has been criticized in the past for not enabling this kind of network-level security, and so it appeared for Pixel users not just on iPhones but on Samsungs as well to be a progress as well.

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These new mobile network security features require tight integration between hardware modems and operating system software, and while the beta hinted that this would be available at least on new Pixel 9 releases, that’s obviously not the case – at least not yet . Where available, users can choose to receive notifications when a phone connects to an unencrypted network or when a network requests a device or SIM identity. It also provides a setting to prevent connections to unencrypted networks.

To be fair to Google, the company never missed a release date and never confirmed that the mobile security update would be available with the first version of Android 15 or with Pixel 9s. However, the company gave its I/O announcement caveats, saying that the new security “requires integration from device OEMs and compatible hardware” and that “we are working with the Android ecosystem to bring these features to users.” “We expect OEM adoption to progress over the next few years.” But we meant other Android OEMs, not Pixel.

We still don’t know if work is currently underway to update the current hardware. As Android Authority says: “Hopefully these new mobile security features will actually make their way to some Android devices in the near future.”