Older Android phones won't open secure sites next year
If you are using an older Android phone, its time for you to cash in on the ongoing Diwali sale and upgrade. This is because a number of Android phones running older versions (Android 7.1.1 Nougat or before) of the operating system will block you from accessing a number of websites. Read on to know more about this.
Older Android phones will stop showing access to popular sites
It is suggested that Android users with Android Nougat or lower on their smartphones will start getting certificate errors while accessing secure websites. This is because Let's Encrypt, which is one of the popular certificate providers, well end its partnership with certification authority IdenTrust, starting September 30, 2021. For the unversed, Let's Encrypt provides certificates to over 30 per cent of web domains needed for the HTTPS protocol.
With this change, around 33.8% of Android users will either get errors while accessing secure websites or the websites will fail to load fully. The end of the deal will impact these Android phones as they haven't been updated since 2016.
Announced via a blog post, Let's Encrypt's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews suggested that the company won't renew its deal with IdenTrust and will now shift to its own ISRG Root X1 root certificate after ending its cross-signing deal with IdenTrust for its DST Root X3 root.
"Five years ago, when Let’s Encrypt launched, that’s exactly what we did. We got a cross-signature from IdenTrust. Their “DST Root X3” had been around for a long time, and all the major software platforms trusted it already: Windows, Firefox, macOS, Android, iOS, and a variety of Linux distributions. That cross-signature allowed us to start issuing certificates right away and have them be useful to a lot of people. Without IdenTrust, Let’s Encrypt may have never happened and we are grateful to them for their partnership. Meanwhile, we issued our own root certificate (“ISRG Root X1”) and applied for it to be trusted by the major software platforms," said the blog post.
While the partnership is expected to end in September next year, Let's Encrypt will stop cross-signing, starting January 11, 2021.
Therefore, it's best for users to upgrade to a new Android phone for the ease of accessing websites. In case they don't want to, Let's Encrypt suggests that users can install Firefox Mobile for it comes with its own trusted root certificates.
