What is Android's 'per-app language preferences' feature introduced in Android 13, and does it have any security implications?
- A.Per-app language preferences live in credential-encrypted storage (the setting is written into the app's own CE directory), unreachable before the first unlock of the day: the security implication is forensic, in that an examiner working from a cold-boot image recovers no locale evidence at all for any installed app, losing a signal that regularly narrows a suspect pool
- B.Apps can have a language set independently of the system locale; while primarily a UX feature, it has a minor privacy implication - an attacker observing the per-app locale setting could infer a user's language preference for a specific app (e.g., a minority language set only for a banking app) revealing sensitive information about the user
- C.Per-app language is a security feature in its own right (the platform pins every warning dialog to the system locale), leaving a social engineer no way to present a translated prompt: all framework-owned text stays in the language the owner chose at setup