Android 15 has an interesting “Adaptive timeout” feature

Android has a feature that lets users decide how long of inactivity takes place before the phone screen is turned off. It even has a smart feature called “Screen attention” that detects if you’re looking at your phone and won’t turn off the display. But now in the third beta of Android 15, there’s a new option called “Adaptive timeout”.

According to the caption of the feature, it says that it “automatically turns off your screen if you’re not using your device”. At this point in time it is unclear how that works. The folks at 9to5Google installed the Android 15 beta but it appears that it isn’t working right now, but it is quite intriguing.

We’re not sure how it will differ from the Screen attention feature. The publication speculates that it could rely on things like the hardware sensors in your phone, like the front-facing camera or proximity sensors to come to a decision. We imagine that it could come in handy for situations where you’re browsing a website but turn your attention away for a minute.

This way, it will keep the phone’s display unlocked and the website loaded. This is because sometimes a website might reload when your phone’s display is off for an extended period of time, so it could save users some time instead of waiting for it to reload. In any case, we’ll have to wait until a later build of Android 15 to get a better idea of what to expect.