Smart home users may soon be able to turn off Thread credential backup (APK teardown)

If you have a smart home, you may be very excited when you receive a notification that the Thread credentials stored on your phone will be saved Sync to cloud. This is a pretty big deal, as it promises to simplify setting up new smart home devices and improve security. But what if you don’t want to back up your credentials to the cloud? It looks like you’ll be able to opt out of this feature soon.

Today, we’re looking at the latest beta version of Google Play Services (version 24.50.32). In this beta, we encountered the option to turn off thread credential backup.

For those who don’t know, Thread is a networking protocol that uses mesh networking to relay signals between smart home devices. Ensure that unauthorized devices cannot join your network and start interacting with you Smart devicethe mesh network is protected by a complex machine-generated code that acts as a password. This is called thread credentials.

The option to turn off credential backup appears to be on the Threads web page, which can be accessed from Google Play Services. This is a new page we found Back in September, but at the time it was almost empty, showing only a loading bar.

If you decide to disable sync, a pop-up window will appear. This pop-up will inform you that turning this option off may make it more difficult to add devices to the Thread network. At the bottom of the pop-up, you can choose Don’t Save or Cancel.

Prior to this, users could choose to delete certificates that had been stored in the cloud. However, until now they have not had the ability to prevent their credentials from being saved.