How to activate the “panic button” on Android in case of emergency

You’re browsing casually with your smartphone, and suddenly ad pages start to appear (all of them suspicious, let’s be real). One, two, three… and so on until your cell phone basically stops responding. Did you know there’s a way to stop this process, so it doesn’t freak you out again? At Softonic, we want to help you the next time this happens, so we’re going to show you how to enable the “panic button” on Android in case of emergency.

What it’s for

Before showing you how to use it, we think it’s important to explain what it’s for. As we’ve mentioned before, the “panic button” is an option that Google developers introduced in the Android Nougat for when your cell phone isn’t responding as you’d like.

This can happen for several reasons: ad pages open in the browser as we’ve noted; an app has gotten control of the device without permission; some program isn’t working correctly and got stuck, etc.

The idea of the “panic button” is, as the name suggests, so we don’t start to panic. With it, we won’t freak out when we see our Smartphone isn’t working right.

How to enable it

As we’ve pointed out, this feature is only available on Android Nougat, and more specifically from the 7.1 version onwards. So, the first requirement to be able to use this “button” is, of course, to have this version of Android or above.

If you fulfill that requirement, enabling the “panic button” is so easy it’s scary. In fact, you’ve probably done it at some point: you just have to click repeatedly on the back button (more than four times in three seconds, which seems like a lot but isn’t really).

After clicking, Android will take you to the start screen. In fact, all the processes running will stop automatically, and you can uninstall that app with malware, close the problematic browser or see what’s going wrong.

Now that you know how to enable this “panic button,” we urge you to use it every time you think there’s an emergency on your device. Of course, remember that when you use it, it will cut off the processes you’ve got open at the time (no exceptions).