Android 15 Beta 3 introduces a not fully functional "Adaptive Timeout" feature

Currently, if you forget to manually lock your phone, it will automatically lock itself after a set period of inactivity thanks to a feature called "Screen attention." This feature uses the front-facing camera to see if you're looking at the screen and prevents your Pixel from locking based on your chosen timeout setting.

However, with "Adaptive timeout," your phone will automatically turn off the screen if you're not using it. This is an interesting addition as it appears to go beyond the current "Screen attention" toggle, which only prevents your phone from locking itself but doesn't turn off the screen.

Although it's not entirely clear how this feature works, it's possible that it uses on-device hardware like the front-facing camera and proximity sensors to figure out if you're using your phone. Then, it decides whether to lock it or keep it unlocked based on that.

While the idea behind Adaptive Timeout is promising, early testing reported that the feature wasn't functional in the initial Beta 3 release, even though it was present for some users in the settings. Actually, even after enabling Adaptive Timeout in the settings, their Pixel phones continued to adhere to the standard screen timeout settings. This suggests that the feature is still under development and may require further refinement before it works as intended.

It's important to remember that Beta versions are released specifically to test new features and iron out bugs, so it's perfectly normal for some features to be incomplete or non-functional at this stage. That said, the addition of the "Adaptive timeout" option adds to the list of quality-of-life improvements in Android 15 Beta, even though it's not fully functional yet. We'll have to wait and see how this feature evolves as Android 15 continues its beta cycle.