Check Your Phone Before Apps Stop Working This Month

Forbes

08-05-2025

Be warned — everything changes this month.
There's bad news for more than a billion Android users this month. The apps on your phone may start to fail. This is deliberate, and follows a huge change Google has just made to the way Play Store operates. That's not the only issue. Those same billion users also now face a critical new security threat, after another change from Google.
All this stems from the Android OS version running on your phone. While the Android 15 upgrade and latest Android 16 beta steal the headlines, more than half of all Android users still run phones on Android 12 or older. Take a look at Android's monthly security bulletins and you'll spot that while Android 12 was updated with critical fixes in March, come April and May that stopped. Only Android 13, 14 and 15 received updates.
That means that Google's warning this week that Android is under attack is a major concern for those users. CVE-2025-27363 has only been fixed for Android 13 and 14. But there's another major new issue as well, one with even more serious long-term implications for the way in which those billion phones work moving forward.
Starting this month, Google has changed the way in which its Play Integrity API works. This enables developers to change how their apps run depending upon the OS on a phone and the recency of security updates. And in this, Google has drawn a line between Android 13 and newer on one side, and Android 12 and older on the other.
For Android 12 and below, Google says 'this update gives apps with higher security needs, like banking and finance apps, governments, and enterprise apps, more ways to tailor their level of protection for sensitive features, like transferring money. When the strong label isn't available for the user, we recommend that you have a fallback option.'
That 'fallback option' means restrictions and reduced functionality.
This means you now have two good reasons to check the Android version on your phone. If it's Android 12 or less, check if you can upgrade to a newer version of the OS. If you can't and if your OEM has not confirmed it is backporting Android updates for your OS, then you should upgrade your phone to something newer.
If you're sticking with Android 12, then make sure you run good security software on your device — and be prepared for some apps to stop working properly from this month.