We’re almost two thirds of the way through 2024, and yet there’s only a single Android device that supports Qi2. Qi2, if you haven’t heard, is an evolution of the Qi wireless charging standard developed by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC). The Qi2 standard was announced back in January 2023 and released in April 2023, but fast forward to today, and none of the major Android brands have released a Qi2-certified mobile device.

Or so we thought, until we learned that the Samsung Galaxy Ring is Qi2 certified. The Galaxy Ring is not only Samsung’s first smart ring product but also its first mobile device with Qi2 certification. We already knew from the launch event that the Galaxy Ring’s case can be wirelessly charged using Qi wireless charging, but we didn’t know until recently that the case is actually Qi2 certified. We learned this thanks to Samsung’s certification filing with the WPC, as shown below (H/T George Economo).

As you can see, the Samsung Galaxy Ring supports specification version 2.0.0 of the Qi wireless charging standard. In other words, it’s Qi2 certified and supports Qi2 charging. Other Qi2-certified products in the WPC database include the HMD Skyline, which is notably the first Android phone to receive Qi2 certification, and every iPhone since the iPhone 12.

The iPhone 12 supporting Qi2 charging isn’t surprising, because even though it was released in late 2021, Apple played a big role in the development of the Qi2 standard. In fact, it’s the reason the new standard even exists in the first place, as the Qi2 standard’s highlight feature is based on Apple’s MagSafe technology.

If you’ve heard of Qi2 before, then you’ve probably heard it described as “MagSafe but for Android.” That’s a mostly accurate description of Qi2 since the new standard is best known for introducing the Magnetic Power Profile (MPP), which uses magnets to align the wireless charging receiver and transmitter. By using magnets to align the charging coils perfectly, Qi2 improves energy efficiency by reducing the energy loss that would otherwise happen when the coils aren’t aligned. The magnets can also be used to attach other accessories, making Qi2 support useful for more than just charging. It’s why MagSafe adapters for Android phones have exploded in popularity in recent years.

It’s also why techies are on the lookout for Android and Android-adjacent products that support Qi2 charging and why there was so much disappointment when we learned about the Pixel 9’s wireless charging capabilities. So when we were sent a tip that the Samsung Galaxy Ring is Qi2 certified, we were naturally really excited by the discovery. Unfortunately, our excitement quickly faded once we tried to attach the Galaxy Ring’s charging case to various MagSafe and Qi2 chargers; the case just would not magnetically snap onto these chargers, suggesting it doesn’t have any magnets in the first place.

That revelation came as a surprise to many of us since the Qi2 standard has been heavily marketed for its magnetic charging capabilities. However, we’ve since learned that the Qi2 charging standard does not, in fact, mandate magnetic charging support. In fact, the Qi2 standard actually consists of two profiles: the new Magnetic Power Profile I previously mentioned as well as an “enhancement to the existing wireless charging Extended Power Profile (EPP) that does not include magnets but complies with the Qi v2.0 standard.”

According to a WPC press release from November of last year, Qi2-certified products that don’t support magnetic charging will be “branded with the existing Qi logo consumers know and use today.” The WPC’s current branding guidelines reveal that only Qi2-licensed products with MPP support can have the new Qi2 logo featured on the packaging, whereas Qi2-licensed products without MPP support cannot use the new logo.

Indeed, the Qi2 logo is nowhere to be found on the Galaxy Ring’s packaging. By digging deeper into the WPC’s database, we can see that the Galaxy Ring only supports the Baseline Power Profile (BPP) of the Qi2 standard. That means that, while the Galaxy Ring does technically support Qi2 charging, it doesn’t support the most useful aspect of the new standard: magnetic charging. Hopefully, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S25 series will support Qi2 magnetic charging, as it’s disappointing that there’s still only one Android phone out there that actually supports the new standard.

Setting up a new Android phone can take quite a bit of time, so if you’re in a hurry, you might be tempted to speed through the setup wizard so you can use your new phone. Depending on the device, if you decline to transfer your data from your old phone during the initial setup process, you lose the opportunity to do so at a later time. That’s been the case for Google’s Pixel phones for the longest time, but fortunately, that’s no longer true with the new Google Pixel 9 series.

It’s quite easy to back up your Android phone thanks to the backup service that’s available on every Android device with Google apps. The Google backup service lets you backup your device’s contacts, call history, settings, apps and their data, SMS messages, and MMS messages. This data is automatically backed up over Wi-Fi when your device has been idle and charging for two hours, so you don’t need to worry about keeping it up to date yourself.

When you’re setting up a new Pixel device, you can either restore it from a Google backup in the cloud or move your data from an existing device. The former is helpful for when you don’t have your previous phone anymore, while the latter is helpful for when you do as it’s much faster and allows for more data to be brought over.

If you don’t pick one of these options while you’re going through the initial setup process, they unfortunately can’t be accessed after setup has been completed. The only way to access the Google data restoration page again after completing setup is to perform a factory reset. Thankfully with the launch of the new Pixel 9, Google has finally added a way to copy your data over from your old phone after setup.

At last week’s Made by Google launch event, we spotted a new top-level entry in the Settings app on the Pixel 9 called “Back up or copy data.” Under this option, we spotted a new “copy data” page that lets you “bring data from another device.” Here, you can choose to “copy photos, contacts, messages, and more” from your previous device. The best part is that in doing so, “you won’t lose recent data” as “the data you copy is merged with the data on” your new device. Plus, if you’ve already changed some settings on your Pixel 9, those changes won’t be overwritten while copying your old device’s data.

Since we only briefly had access to the Pixel 9 series at last week’s event, we weren’t able to actually test this new post-setup data transfer feature, but we don’t see why it wouldn’t work as described. Several brands already offer a similar feature to restore data after setup, such as Smart Switch in Samsung’s One UI software, so Google adding it to the Pixel 9 is long overdue. Still, it’s nice to see Google finally include such a feature on its own devices, as it’ll make setting them up even easier for more users. Hopefully, they extend this option to devices from other brands in the future.

Security vulnerabilities are lurking in most of the apps you use on a day-to-day basis; there’s just no way for most companies to preemptively fix every possible security issue because of human error, deadlines, lack of resources, and a multitude of other factors. That’s why many organizations run bug bounty programs to get external help with fixing these issues. The Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) is an example of a bug bounty program that paid security researchers to find vulnerabilities in popular Android apps, but it’s being shut down later this month.

Google announced the Google Play Security Reward Program back in October 2017 as a way to incentivize security searchers to find and, most importantly, responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in popular Android apps distributed through the Google Play Store.

When the GPSRP first launched, it was limited to a select number of developers who were only allowed to submit eligible vulnerabilities that affected applications from a small number of participating developers. Eligible vulnerabilities include those that lead to remote code execution or theft of insecure private data, with payouts initially reaching a maximum of $5,000 for vulnerabilities of the former type and $1,000 for the latter type.

Over the years, the scope of the Google Play Security Reward Program program expanded to cover developers of some of the biggest Android apps such as Airbnb, Alibaba, Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Grammarly, Instacart, Line, Lyft, Opera, Paypal, Pinterest, Shopify, Snapchat, Spotify, Telegram, Tesla, TikTok, Tinder, VLC, and Zomato, among many others.

In August 2019, Google opened up the GPSRP to cover all apps in Google Play with at least 100 million installations, even if they didn’t have their own vulnerability disclosure or bug bounty program. In July 2019, the rewards were increased to a maximum of $20,000 for remote code execution bugs and $3,000 for bugs that led to the theft of insecure private data or access to protected app components.

The purpose of the Google Play Security Reward Program was simple: Google wanted to make the Play Store a more secure destination for Android apps. According to the company, vulnerability data they collected from the program was used to help create automated checks that scanned all apps available in Google Play for similar vulnerabilities. In 2019, Google said these automated checks helped more than 300,000 developers fix more than 1,000,000 apps on Google Play. Thus, the downstream effect of the GPSRP is that fewer vulnerable apps are distributed to Android users.

However, Google has now decided to wind down the Google Play Security Reward Program. In an email to participating developers, such as Sean Pesce, the company announced that the GPSRP will end on August 31st.

The reason Google gave is that the program has seen a decrease in the number of actionable vulnerabilities reported. The company credits this success to the “overall increase in the Android OS security posture and feature hardening efforts.”

The full email sent to developers is reproduced below:

“Dear Researchers,

 

I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to express my sincere gratitude to all of you who have submitted bugs to the Google Play Security Reward Program over the past few years. Your contributions have been invaluable in helping us to improve the security of Android and Google Play.

 

As a result of the overall increase in the Android OS security posture and feature hardening efforts, we’ve seen fewer actionable vulnerabilities reported by the research community. Due to this decrease in actionable vulnerabilities reported, we are winding down the GPSRP program. The GPSRP program will end on August 31st. Any reports submitted before then will be triaged by September 15th. Final reward decisions will be made before September 30th when the program is officially discontinued. Final payments may take a few weeks to process.

 

I want to assure you that all of your reports will be reviewed and addressed before the program ends. We greatly value your input and want to make sure that any issues you have identified are resolved.

 

Thank you again for your support of the GPSRP program. We hope that you will continue working with us, on programs like the Android and Google Devices Security Reward Program.

 

Best regards,

Tony

On behalf of the Android Security Team”

In September of 2018, nearly a year after the GPSRP was announced, Google said that researchers had reported over 30 vulnerabilities through the program, earning a combined bounty of over $100k. Approximately a year later, in August of 2019, Google said that the program had paid out over $265k in bounties.

As far as we know, the company hasn’t disclosed how much they’ve paid out to security researchers since then, but we’d be surprised if the number isn’t notably higher than $265k given how long it’s been since the last disclosure and the number of popular apps in the crosshairs of security researchers.

Google shutting down this program is a mixed bag for users. On one hand, it means that popular apps have largely gotten their act together, but on the other hand, it means that some security researchers won’t have the incentive to disclose any future vulnerabilities responsibly, especially if those vulnerabilities impact an app made by a developer who doesn’t run their own bug bounty program.

Due to the growing popularity of foldable phones and the resurgence of Android tablets, Google has been hard at work optimizing Android’s UI for large-screen devices. Their work is far from done, of course, but we’ve already gotten several exciting features from these efforts. For example, Android finally has its own taskbar, a dock that sits at the bottom of every screen so users can quickly switch between apps. The design and functionality of Android’s taskbar have changed significantly since its original inception, but one thing that hasn’t changed is its availability: it’s only available on large-screen devices. That could change in an upcoming Android 15 release, though, as Google is finally preparing to bring the taskbar to phones.

The taskbar was first introduced in 2022’s Android 12L release, a special release of Android aimed at large-screen devices. In its original version, the Android taskbar resided at the bottom of the screen, with app icons pulled from the user’s home screen dock. It was shown persistently on screen and stretched the entire width of the display, much like taskbars on desktop operating systems. With the release of Android 13, though, Google made the taskbar hideable by long-pressing on an empty space.

In the iOS versus Android debate, one area where Android generally comes out on top is notifications. However, Android still has some issues to deal with in that regard. For example, heads-up notifications are way too distracting when you’re watching a video or playing a game. Fortunately, Google has a fix in the works for this particular issue, and we could see it go live in an upcoming Android 15 release.

The heads-up notification was introduced nearly a decade ago with the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop. It’s a type of notification that appears in a floating window on the top of the screen that you can immediately see and interact with, no matter what app you’re using. It’s intended only to be used for important notifications that you need to know about immediately, such as messages from a close friend or family member. Notifications of this type can appear when they’re part of a channel with a high importance level or when an app is in fullscreen mode. When a heads-up notification appears over a fullscreen app, it can be quite distracting, which is why many people complain about the feature online and also try to find ways to disable it.

Whether it’s your headphones, your smartwatch, your mouse, or your keyboard, you probably use Bluetooth to wirelessly connect your devices each and every day. So many devices use the wireless communications standard that you might end up pairing or repairing them once every couple of days. Pairing Bluetooth devices can be a hassle, which is why Google created Fast Pair, a feature that greatly simplifies the Bluetooth pairing process. Fast Pair currently works with accessories like headphones, smartwatches, tracker tags, and mice, but Google is preparing to expand support to keyboards.

Google Fast Pair Service, or just Fast Pair for short, was introduced back in 2017 and was originally designed to simplify connecting audio accessories like speakers, headphones, and car kits with devices running Android. It’s implemented in the Google Play Services app on Android phones, tablets, smartwatches, and TVs, which means it’s available on any Android device that ships with Google apps preinstalled. Since March of 2023, it’s also been available in the Chrome OS operating system running on Chromebooks.

Although Android has long offered apps the ability to use your phone’s entire screen by letting them draw content underneath the status and navigation bars, many apps don’t take advantage of this. There are many reasons why developers have shied away from making their apps go edge-to-edge, but in the upcoming Android 15 update, they’ll have no choice but to do so — or at least, that’s what we thought.

For a bit of context, apps have long been able to go edge-to-edge by implementing a few APIs that tells the OS to draw the app underneath the two “system bars” (ie. the status and navigation bars). The reason that Google didn’t immediately enforce this behavior is that many apps might have UI issues if they were forced to go edge-to-edge. For example, an app might have an interactive element like a floating action button that would overlap with the navigation bar if it went edge-to-edge.

We’re less than two weeks away from Made by Google 2024, Google’s annual hardware event, where it’s expected to announce new Pixel phones, earbuds, smartwatches, and potentially other devices. As is tradition at this point, practically every detail about the four phones that Google is expected to unveil in the Pixel 9 series has already leaked. At this point, we’re just waiting to get our own hands on one, but given that we’re so close to launch, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are already several people out there with one. In fact, someone was just casually spotted using the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at a Starbucks in Taiwan.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, in case you aren’t aware, is Google’s second-generation foldable phone, and it’s set to be fully unveiled at the company’s upcoming hardware event. From the ample information that’s leaked as well as the official renders that Google has shared, it’s clear that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will have a narrower profile than its predecessor. This is clearly discernible in a picture of the device that someone posted to a private Facebook group. This picture was allegedly taken at a Starbucks somewhere in Taiwan, though we don’t have any more information about where it was taken, who took the photo, or who was using the device. We also only have a single shot of the device, which makes sense as clearly, the person who took the photo was trying to be sneaky.

Given the phone’s distinctive camera bump and conspicuous “G” logo emblazoned on the official case, it’s no surprise it was recognized out in the wild. While there’s nothing new we can learn from this photo, it is technically our first real-world look at the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in one of its official cases. Although the phone itself appears to be the Obsidian (black) model, the case seems to be for the Porcelain (off-white) model. It’s hard to tell exactly how thick the case is from this photo alone, but it appears to be thick enough to make the device sit flat on a table. Without this case, I’d imagine that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will be a bit wobbly when it’s placed on a table.

The photo also shows off other aspects of the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, including how it looks from the rear when unfolded, its squarish camera bump, taller cover display with a hole-punch camera, and side buttons. We can also see what appear to be cutouts at the top for a microphone and speaker. Thanks to the deluge of leaks in the last few weeks, we don’t need to use our imaginations to guess what the rest of the phone looks like. We also don’t need to make guesses about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s internal specifications, including its cameras and displays, nor do we need to wait to find out its features or pricing. Our dedicated Pixel 9 Pro Fold rumor hub has all the details on Google’s upcoming foldable phone if you’re interested in learning more. Now, we just need to wait a couple more weeks to get a unit in our own hands.

Thanks to JING on X for the tip!

We’re less than two weeks away from Made by Google 2024, Google’s annual hardware event, where it’s expected to announce new Pixel phones, earbuds, smartwatches, and potentially other devices. As is tradition at this point, practically every detail about the four phones that Google is expected to unveil in the Pixel 9 series has already leaked. At this point, we’re just waiting to get our own hands on one, but given that we’re so close to launch, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are already several people out there with one. In fact, someone was just casually spotted using the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at a Starbucks in Taiwan.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, in case you aren’t aware, is Google’s second-generation foldable phone, and it’s set to be fully unveiled at the company’s upcoming hardware event. From the ample information that’s leaked as well as the official renders that Google has shared, it’s clear that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will have a narrower profile than its predecessor. This is clearly discernible in a picture of the device that someone posted to a private Facebook group. This picture was allegedly taken at a Starbucks somewhere in Taiwan, though we don’t have any more information about where it was taken, who took the photo, or who was using the device. We also only have a single shot of the device, which makes sense as clearly, the person who took the photo was trying to be sneaky.

Given the phone’s distinctive camera bump and conspicuous “G” logo emblazoned on the official case, it’s no surprise it was recognized out in the wild. While there’s nothing new we can learn from this photo, it is technically our first real-world look at the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in one of its official cases. Although the phone itself appears to be the Obsidian (black) model, the case seems to be for the Porcelain (off-white) model. It’s hard to tell exactly how thick the case is from this photo alone, but it appears to be thick enough to make the device sit flat on a table. Without this case, I’d imagine that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will be a bit wobbly when it’s placed on a table.

The photo also shows off other aspects of the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, including how it looks from the rear when unfolded, its squarish camera bump, taller cover display with a hole-punch camera, and side buttons. We can also see what appear to be cutouts at the top for a microphone and speaker. Thanks to the deluge of leaks in the last few weeks, we don’t need to use our imaginations to guess what the rest of the phone looks like. We also don’t need to make guesses about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s internal specifications, including its cameras and displays, nor do we need to wait to find out its features or pricing. Our dedicated Pixel 9 Pro Fold rumor hub has all the details on Google’s upcoming foldable phone if you’re interested in learning more. Now, we just need to wait a couple more weeks to get a unit in our own hands.

Thanks to JING on X for the tip!

There are a lot of factors that affect the audio quality of the music you’re listening to, many of which simply can’t be fixed without shelling out more money on new hardware. However, there are ways to improve your listening experience without buying new hardware, such as by learning how to equalize (EQ). One of the best equalizer apps for Android is called Wavelet, and with its most recent update, it’s added a feature that fixes a problem you probably didn’t know existed.

The need for equal loudness

Back in the 1930s, a pair of scientists named Harvey Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson measured how loud a sound at one frequency needs to be in order for it to be perceived as equally loud as a sound at another frequency. These measurements were put together into graphs known as the Fletcher-Munson curves, and they showed that humans perceive certain frequencies as louder when the actual loudness of the sound decreases (and vice versa). In 2003, the Fletcher-Munson curves were revised and codified into the ISO 226 standards document, which outlines the “combinations of sound pressure levels and frequencies of pure continuous tones which are perceived as equally loud by human listeners.”

You don’t need to know what’s in the ISO 226 document to understand the implications of its equal-loudness contours. What it proves is that when you’re listening to audio at low volume levels, frequencies in the midrange sound much louder than low or high frequencies. This is especially noticeable, at least for me, with the lower frequencies; when I lower the volume of my music, a lot of the “thumpiness” of the bass disappears because it’s drowned out by the midrange. I personally didn’t even realize this was an issue until I tried out the new equal loudness feature in the latest beta release of the Wavelet app.

Wavelet is an equalizer app for Android that quickly became a favorite among audio enthusiasts after it was released in the middle of 2020. Its standout feature was its support for AutoEq, a way to easily equalize your headphones to the Harman standard using a device-specific preset. The community-made AutoEq database has presets for thousands of headphone models and is constantly updated with new additions, so it’s really easy for newbies with no knowledge of audio processing to adjust their headphone’s audio profile to the Harman standard.

How to use equal loudness in Wavelet

And with the upcoming v24.05 update to Wavelet, which is now in beta, the app will add an equal loudness mode that retains the sound signature of your music no matter what volume step you’re listening to. This means that the volume of low and high frequencies won’t dip more than midrange frequencies when you lower the volume, correcting the issue I mentioned before. Under the hood, the equal loudness mode applies loudness corrections based on the ISO 226 equal-loudness contours. The app provides a nice visualization to show how the sound changes when you change the volume on your device. To set the feature up, you just need to do the following:

1. Download, install, and go through Wavelet’s setup process.
2. Connect your preferred headphones to your phone.
3. Play some music and set the volume to the level you normally prefer to listen to.
4. Tap on equal loudness to open the page. You should see a toggle to enable equal loudness, a slider to adjust the volume threshold, and a curve showing how the loudness of the frequencies will be impacted.
5. Adjust the volume threshold slider to the lowest value before the graph starts to change. In other words, if the graph is flat at -13dB but you start to see it dip a little bit when you increase it to -12dB, then you should set it to -13dB.
6. That’s it! You won’t need to tweak these settings any further for your preferred headphones, but if you connect a different pair later on, you’ll need to redo step #5 because Wavelet saves settings on a per-device basis.

I personally noticed an immediate difference when I played some music, lowered the volume, and then toggled equal loudness on and off. I could suddenly hear the bass properly in a lot of the songs I listen to, even at really low volumes. From the brief time I’ve used this feature, it’s already made listening to music more enjoyable for me, especially when I’m working. I highly recommend just giving equal loudness a try in the Wavelet app if you’re skeptical.

Wavelet giveaway

Equal loudness joins several other nifty audio tuning features in Wavelet, including the aforementioned AutoEq, a 9-band graphic equalizer, a limiter, channel balance, reverberation, a virtualizer, and a bass tuner. To fund the app’s development, the developer has made some of its features, including the new equal loudness mode, available only to people who buy the pro version of the app. With a one-time $4.99 in-app purchase, the pro version of Wavelet unlocks the reverberation, virtualizer, bass tuner, and equal loudness features.

To celebrate the release of equal loudness in Wavelet version 24.05, which also brings a massive expansion to the AutoEq database, a Quick Setting tile, and a significant reduction in RAM usage, the developer has given us 100 promo codes to give away! To participate in the giveaway, just visit my profile on X, Threads, Mastodon, or Telegram. I’ll be sharing 35 codes on X, 35 codes on Telegram, 20 codes on Threads, and 10 codes on Mastodon half an hour after this post goes live.

To redeem a code, open the Google Play Store app on your phone, tap on your profile picture, tap on Payments & subscriptions, tap on Redeem code, and then enter the promo code in the text box that appears.

Most Android phones are able to keep themselves cool by intelligently regulating their own performance, but there are times when drastic measures need to be taken to prevent damage to internal components. If you’re using your phone outdoors under the hot sun, then naturally, your phone will heat up a lot more than if you were using it indoors. Combine that with the increased power draw from the display needing to ramp up its own brightness to remain visible and the power-hungry 5G modem needing to connect to distant towers, and it’s no wonder that overheating is a problem for some users.

Fortunately for Pixel users, Google has already baked in a couple of anti-overheating features to prevent damage to your phone. For example, Google says on a support page that Pixel phones intentionally limit some functions when they sense they’re too hot. These include throttling performance, slowing down charging speeds, turning off the camera’s LED flash, disabling camera capture, and partially or fully disabling the mobile data or Wi-Fi connection. Google even warns that your phone may automatically turn itself off once it gets dangerously hot, a safety feature that’s quite common on consumer electronics.

There are only so many actions that your phone can take by itself to regulate its temperature when it’s overheating, though. No amount of performance throttling or feature disabling can combat the heat from a scorching sun, which is where you, the user, needs to step in. There are some simple yet very effective steps you can take to cool down your phone when it’s overheating, and thanks to the Pixel’s new “Adaptive Thermal” feature, you won’t need to open up a web browser to see what they are.

In the latest version of the Pixel’s Device Health Services app (version 1.27), we spotted some strings related to a new Adaptive Thermal feature. This feature consists of several components, including a notification that spawns a dialog and a battery temperature measurement service.

When the battery temperature reaches 49 degrees Celsius (~120 degrees Fahrenheit), the “pre-emergency” alert is triggered. This causes a notification to be posted that says your “phone needs to cool down.” The notification says you “may experience slower performance” and should “try avoiding direct sunlight or close any battery-intensive apps.” A single button to See care steps is included in the notification.

<string name="pre_emergency_notification_title">Phone needs to cool down</string>
<string name="pre_emergency_notification_content">You may experience slower performance. Try avoiding direct sunlight or close any battery-intensive apps.</string>
<string name="pre_emergency_notification_action_button">See care steps</string>

Tapping the See care steps button will spawn a dialog that shares more information on what steps the operating system is taking to cool down the device, such as temporarily limiting performance speed and disabling the 5G network. It also reiterates some tips on how you can help cool down your phone, such as avoiding direct sunlight, putting your phone in the open for better airflow, or closing any battery-intensive apps such as videos, games, and the camera. You can dismiss the dialog by tapping the Got it button or tapping Learn more, which opens the support page mentioned earlier.

<string name="pre_emergency_dialog_title">Phone needs to cool down</string>
<string name="pre_emergency_dialog_content">"Pixel will try to cool your phone down by temporarily limiting:

• Performance speed
• Disabling 5G network, and more

How to help cool down your phone:

• Try avoiding direct sunlight
• Put your phone in the open for airflow
• Close any battery-intensive apps such as videos, games, and the camera

Once your phone cools down, it will run normally again"</string>
<string name="pre_emergency_dialog_dismiss_button">Got it</string>
<string name="pre_emergency_dialog_action_button">Learn more</string>

Adaptive Thermal will sample the battery temperature every five minutes to see if the phone has cooled down. If the phone still hasn’t cooled down but instead reaches 52 degrees Celsius (~126 degrees Fahrenheit), Adaptive Thermal enters the “emergency” state. I don’t know what exactly happens in this state, but I’m assuming even more drastic actions are taken. If those actions don’t help to cool down the phone and it reaches a dangerous 55 degrees Celsius (~131 degrees Fahrenheit), then Adaptive Thermal will warn the user 30 seconds before it shuts down the phone to protect itself.

<string name="pre_shutdown_dialog_title">Phone will shut down in about 30 secs due to high temperature</string>

The flags for Adaptive Thermal aren’t enabled yet, but even after enabling them, I was unable to actually trigger the alert. This is mainly because I couldn’t get my phone hot enough to actually trigger it (the closest I got was 46 degrees Celsius, even while running an intensive benchmark under direct sunlight). Fortunately, Adaptive Thermal only alerts you about what the phone is already doing under the hood to protect itself, so you don’t need to worry about it not being available yet. So long as you follow some basic tips, you should be able to cool your phone down before it dangerously overheats.

Hopefully, future devices from Google — such as the upcoming Google Pixel 9 series — have better thermal regulation features to prevent overheating. The rumored shift to TSMC for next year’s Tensor G5 chipset could also help with efficiency, but we won’t know for quite a while. If you own a Pixel device, do you feel that it overheats often? Let us know in the comments!

With companies like Samsung and Google extending their phone update policies to seven years, it’s never been more important to research what your options are in case your phone breaks or seems to be wearing down in some way. Even though many hardware issues can’t be properly diagnosed — let alone repaired — without taking your phone to a repair center, there are some things you can check yourself to save you some time and money. In the upcoming Android 15 update, Google is preparing to add a dedicated device diagnostics page that lets you run some manual tests and check up on the health of some of your phone’s internal components.

Google released Android 15 Beta 3 earlier this week, and after tinkering with the build on one of my Pixel phones, I managed to surface a new entry in the Settings app called Device Diagnostics. This entry is located under the Settings > System location, and while it doesn’t have a description, it’s obvious what this page does after opening it.

The device diagnostics page opens up with two items: “Component health” and “Evaluation mode.” Component health lets you “run manual tests and view battery and storage health.” Evaluation mode lets you “use one device to assess another device.”

Under the Component health page, you can run a display test that shows a series of differently colored screens, making it easy to inspect the screen for defects visually. You can also run a touch test that shows a red screen turning white as you swipe your finger over it, giving an obvious indicator of where touch input may be broken. 

Lastly, the Component health screen lets you check the health of your phone’s battery and storage chip. The battery status page shows you the remaining capacity of your phone’s battery as a percentage of its original capacity, the manufacturing date of your phone’s battery, its first usage date, and its charging cycle count. It also has fields for the serial number and part status, but my device doesn’t support reporting those values, so they were empty.

The storage status page, meanwhile, shows you the remaining lifetime of your phone’s storage chip as well as its total capacity. I previously documented how Android 15 calculates the remaining lifetime of the storage chip in case you’re wondering how that works under the hood. As for how Android is able to estimate your battery’s remaining capacity (and other battery health related information), I also already went into detail on how that works.

Evaluation mode requires a secondary, trusted device to assess the device under evaluation. The device that’s being assessed needs to tap Evaluated device to generate a QR code that the other device can scan. Doing so will run a series of tests on the device that’s being evaluated, some of which require internet access. These tests consist of the same display and touch test from before. Completing these tests generates a report that can be evaluated to see if there are any issues with the device.

I’ve been tracking Google’s work on implementing battery and storage-health-related APIs for a while now, wondering when it would finally provide users an easy way to check up on these components. I’m glad to see that Google is finally adding a way to check the health of these components in Android 15. While the device diagnostics page doesn’t provide a ton of information, nor does it test every component, it could save some folks a lot of hassle, especially those whose issues stem from their device’s display/touch screen, battery, or storage.

To combat the awful green bubble stigma, Google has been pushing Apple to #GetTheMessage, i.e., add support for RCS messaging in the iOS Messages app. In a surprise announcement late last year, Apple confirmed it planned to add support for RCS in the Messages app. RCS in Apple Messages will roll out sometime this year, and Apple confirmed it’ll be based on the RCS Universal Profile standard published by the GSM Association. However, Apple didn’t confirm which version of the RCS Universal Profile it would implement, but thanks to Google, we now know.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and its direct sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, are two of the most iconic video games in history. Nintendo re-released both games on all of its home consoles released after the Nintendo 64, leaving many fans and newcomers alike wondering: What is the best way to play them today? Many would argue that the unofficial ports released by team Harbour Masters are the best way to play both games, but they don’t offer an Android release. Fortunately, one developer took it upon themselves to port the games to Android, letting you play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask natively on your Android device.

How was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask ported to Android?

If you’re wondering how this is even possible, let me try to explain. Back in 2020, a group of developers banded together to form the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZeldaRET). Their stated goal was to “recreate a source code base” for select The Legend of Zelda titles (plus the original Animal Crossing) from scratch, “using information inside the game along with static and/or dynamic analysis.”

If you open the Gmail app on your Android phone today, you might notice a new UI when replying to emails. Today, Google announced that it is rolling out Quick Reply in Gmail, a new UI that makes it easier to respond to emails. Google has been testing this feature out with a handful of users since November of last year, but it’s only now made the change official with the latest Android Feature Drop.

Before this update, if you opened any email in the Gmail app for Android, you’d need to tap the reply button to start composing a message. Tapping the reply button opens up the full-screen email compose UI you’re all probably familiar with. The full-screen email compose UI is great for drafting longer responses, but if you need to just send a quick message, then it’s not really necessary.

Google just unveiled its latest Android Feature Drop earlier today, and it’s one of the most exciting feature drops I can remember. The two features I’m most excited about are part of Play Services’s new Cross-Device Services module, which brings some Apple Continuity-style magic to your Android devices. For example, the new Instant Hotspot feature lets you connect your Android tablet or Chromebook to your phone’s hotspot with a single tap. Instant Hotspot works with phones running Android 11 or newer, with one notable exception: Samsung devices. According to Google, Instant Hotspot will not be available on any Samsung devices.

Because Android is used by billions of people worldwide, Google has to design the operating system with accessibility in mind. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from a degree of hearing loss, which is why Android offers assistive features like Live Captions. There’s only so much that Android itself can do to compensate for hearing loss, though, which is where dedicated assistive devices like hearing aids come in. Android has technically supported hearing aids since Android 10 was released in 2019, but with the upcoming update to Android 15 later this year, the operating system will significantly improve support for them.

Hearing aids, if you aren’t aware, are a type of electronic device that’s designed to help people with hearing loss. They’re inserted into your ears, similar to other types of hearables like wireless earbuds, but their main purpose is not to stream music but to amplify environmental sounds so you can hear better. Many sounds originate from your phone, though, which is why many hearing aids nowadays support Bluetooth connectivity. People with hearing loss want to be able to hear who they’re speaking to in voice calls, watch videos on YouTube, or even listen to music, all of which is possible thanks to Bluetooth.

However, hearing aids, unlike wireless earbuds, absolutely need to have all-day battery life. That’s challenging to achieve when using a standard Bluetooth Classic connection to stream audio from your phone to your hearing aids. Streaming audio between two devices connected via Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) is more battery efficient, but for the longest time, there wasn’t a standardized way to stream audio using Bluetooth LE.

That left things up to companies like Apple and Google to create their own proprietary, Bluetooth LE-based hearing aid protocols. Apple has its Made for iPhone (MFi) hearing aid protocol, while Google has its Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA) protocol. The former was introduced to iOS way back in 2013, while the latter was introduced more recently in 2019 with the release of Android 10. While there are now several hearing aids on the market compatible with both MFi and ASHA, the fragmentation problem remains. Any advancements in the protocol made by one company will only be enjoyed by users of that company’s ecosystem, and since we’re talking about an accessibility service that people rely on, that’s a problem.

Fortunately, there’s now a standardized way for devices to stream audio over Bluetooth Low Energy, and it’s aptly called Bluetooth LE Audio. LE Audio not only supports the development of standard Bluetooth hearing aids that work across platforms but also implements new features like Auracast. We’ve already shown you how Android 15 is baking in better support for LE Audio through a new audio-sharing feature, but that’s not the only LE Audio-related improvement the operating system update will bring.

At Google I/O earlier this month, Google announced that Android 15 will support hearing aids that use both Bluetooth LE Audio (LEA) as well as the company’s ASHA protocol. Furthermore, the update will introduce a new Quick Settings tile that makes connecting and disconnecting to hearing aids much easier. The hearing aid Quick Settings tile is already live in Android 15 Beta 2, in fact, but I don’t have any hearing aids myself to test this feature out.

According to the images that Google showed, though, the Quick Setting pop-up will let users toggle various accessibility features like Live Caption, Live Transcribe, and Sound Notifications. It’ll also let users change the hearing aid preset, which “represents a configuration of the hearing aid signal processing parameters tailored to a specific listening situation,” according to the Bluetooth SIG. The exact presets that can be selected depends on what the hearing aid reports to Android. In the example image that Google shared, there were presets for “Restaurant,” “Music,” “TV,” “Outdoors,” and “All-Round.” Finally, Google says that users will also be able to view the battery level of their connected hearing aids directly within Android’s Settings and Quick Settings.

Improved hearing aid support isn’t the only accessibility-related improvement coming to Android. During Global Accessibility Awareness Day earlier this month, Google announced a number of accessibility updates to its Android apps, including Lookout, Look to Speak, Project Relate, and more. These changes, along with the upcoming improvements to Live Captions that we recently detailed, will make Android even more accessible to people with difficulty hearing or seeing.

Live Caption is one of Android’s best accessibility features. The feature automatically generates captions, in real-time, for any speech detected in audio playing from your phone. This is a really useful feature for people who have difficulty hearing, but it can also come in handy for anyone who can’t raise their phone’s volume enough to make out what’s being said. The generated captions are shown in a floating box that currently can’t be resized but that’s set to change in an upcoming update.

At Google I/O earlier this month, the company talked about the major new accessibility features it’s bringing to Android. It started off by talking about how the Android 15 release improves the platform’s support for hearing aids, how the Sound Notifications feature has been updated to be more accessible, how the Project Relate app’s onboarding process has been improved, and so on. The company highlighted most of these changes in a blog post published during Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), but one change it didn’t highlight on GAAD was the rollout of a new grab bar for Live Caption.

The new grab bar will let users “easily change the number of lines shown for captions.” This feature is supposedly rolling out “this month,” i.e., May 2024. However, we’re near the end of May but have yet to hear any reports of this feature rolling out. Regardless, Google shared an image of what it’ll look like during their presentation, so we’ll know what to look out for when it does roll out.

Although Google says Live Caption’s new grab bar will let users tailor the number of caption lines shown, it didn’t specify exactly how many lines can be shown. The image it shared shows four lines, but it’s likely that more can be shown, given that currently, two or three lines can already be shown depending on text size. Speaking of which, it’s already somewhat possible to fit more text in the Live Caption window simply by enabling “caption preferences” in settings and overriding the text size to a smaller value.

Note that this is a system-wide setting, which means that media apps that already have built-in captions might also be affected. Once the grab bar feature rolls out, though, this won’t be a problem since you won’t need to change the system-wide caption text size in order to show more lines in the Live Caption window.

We don’t know exactly when this feature will roll out, but its rollout is likely imminent, given that Google said it’s coming this month. Google didn’t specify whether this feature will be rolling out to its own Pixel devices first or if it’ll come to other Android devices that have Live Caption. Live Caption is part of the Android System Intelligence app, which Google provides to OEMs in two flavors. The “Private Features” version of the app includes support for Live Caption, and it’s found on devices from many different Android brands like OnePlus, ASUS, and others.

As we spotted earlier this month, alongside the grab bar, Live Caption is also expected to gain several customization features. These features include toggles to show emoji icons, emphasize emotional intensity, include emotional tags, and show the word duration effect.

Google will be releasing its latest Android 15 update later this year, and it’s poised to bring a ton of new features. These include a dedicated Private Space for your apps, saving app pairs, a predictive back gesture, and so much more. The update will also bring loads of minor improvements to the platform, many of which we’re still uncovering. Case in point: in the second beta of Android 15 that Google just released, there’s a new Google Pixel Avatar App that seemingly doesn’t change much. Here’s why Google added it.

Last Wednesday, Google released Android 15 Beta 2 for compatible Pixel devices, which includes every Tensor-powered Pixel. After installing the update, some users noticed that a new Google Pixel Avatar App was installed on their devices. According to my analysis, the Google Pixel Avatar App is simply an unbundled version of the existing avatar picker experience that’s found under Settings > System > Multiple users when you go to change your profile picture. It offers the same experience as the previous iteration that was integrated into the Settings app, complete with the ability to take a photo to use as your profile picture, select an image from your gallery to use as your profile picture, or select from one of several premade profile pictures. However, it adds one new feature: the ability to use your current Google Account picture as your profile picture.

Every major Android update brings a couple of high-level, user-facing features that get a bunch of marketing and attention, but they also make a lot of low-level, under-the-hood changes that can be just as important from a user experience perspective. Take the upcoming Android 15 update as an example. At this week’s Google I/O 2024 developer conference, the second beta of Android 15 was announced with headline-grabbing features like Private Space, App Pairs, improved theft detection services, and a whole lot more. But during I/O, Google also quietly shared some interesting statistics about Android 15, such as that it improves standby battery life by up to three hours on some devices.

At Google I/O, I asked Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform, and Sameet Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem, to explain how Google achieved the battery life improvements that they announced as part of the latest version of Wear OS. If you missed the announcement, Google basically said that marathon runs on smartwatches running Wear OS 5 consume up to 20% less power than they do on Wear OS 4. Samat said this specific improvement was achieved by making a variety of optimizations, with one example being a reduction in how long it takes for the device’s main applications processor (AP) to go back to sleep after being woken up to write some health data. (For the full interview with Dave Burke and Sameet Samat, check out episode 44 of the Android Faithful podcast, of which I am a co-host).

Satellite connectivity in smartphones has been a hot topic ever since Apple introduced it in the iPhone 14 series. There’s a lot of work that goes into enabling satellite connectivity on a mobile device, which is why progress has been slow on the Android side of things. Fortunately, it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll see phones running Android 15 ship with satellite connectivity support.

In a previous Android beta release, we spotted a hidden satellite messaging page that we believed would tie into T-Mobile and SpaceX’s satellite messaging service. With the release of the second Android 15 beta this week, though, several T-Mobile users have found that this page has gone live for them.

During Google I/O 2024, Google unveiled a ton of updates to the Android operating system, including a new version of its wearable platform. Wear OS 5 will be coming later this year, so in preparation for its release, Google shared a preliminary Developer Preview build that offers early access to the platform’s new features and APIs. While we were exploring the first Wear OS 5 Developer Preview build, we discovered that it has several new features not mentioned in Google’s blog post announcing the update.

The first of these features is a new grid-based app launcher, a feature we previously spotted and enabled in Wear OS 4. The Wear OS 5 Developer Preview adds a grid view for the app launcher that you can toggle by going to Settings > General > App view or by scrolling down to the bottom of the app list. The previous list-based app launcher is still provided as an option, of course.

Earlier today, Google rolled out the second beta release of Android 15. Android 15 Beta 2 brings a load of new features, many of which Android Authority previously revealed. However, the new release has some features that we didn’t anticipate, such as a new “adaptive vibration” feature that’s quietly gone live for many Pixel users.

Under Settings > Sound & vibration > Vibration & haptics in Android 15 Beta 2, there’s a new adaptive vibration option. This setting appeared for multiple Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 Pro users, so it doesn’t seem to be limited to just one model. According to its description, adaptive vibration “automatically adjusts your phone’s vibrations based on your environment.” It does this by using your phone’s “microphone and other sensors” to “determine sound levels and context.” To preserve privacy, “no data is recorded.”

Android includes a helpful animation on the adaptive vibration page that explains what the feature does. The animation shows that, when the feature is enabled, your phone’s haptics will vibrate more intensely when your phone is on a couch and less intensely when it’s on a table. This makes sense, since the cushions on a couch can dampen your phone’s vibrations, so it needs to vibrate harder to compensate. On the other hand, your phone’s vibrations can cause other objects on a table to rustle, so reducing the intensity of the haptic motor might be necessary.

It’s not clear what sensors other than the microphone are used to adjust your phone’s vibration intensity, but we’re hoping this feature works well because of its obvious benefits. Google didn’t mention adaptive vibration in any of its marketing material for Android 15 Beta 2, so it’s possible it didn’t intend for it to launch in this release. In fact, I saw strings for this feature in an earlier beta release but thought it wouldn’t go live before the launch of the Google Pixel 9 series.

If you’ve installed Android 15 Beta 2 on your Pixel phone, let us know if the adaptive vibration feature works for you and what you think of it!

Thanks to Telegram user Arseniy Graur for the tip!

Finding the right health and fitness tracker app can be tough because everyone’s personal fitness goals are different. Many people use multiple services so they don’t miss out on a particular feature offered by one of them, but using multiple services can be a hassle since there’s now multiple places to check their health data. That’s why Google created Health Connect, an Android service that acts as a one-stop shop for the user’s health and fitness data.

Health Connect was introduced two years ago at Google I/O 2022. The premise is that health and fitness apps currently store their data in different ways because they’re made by different developers. This makes it difficult for them to share data with one another, since each developer has to write code to convert data from other apps into data that their app can recognize. Health Connect solves this problem by defining its own way to store health data, so apps only need to write code to support Health Connect and not the myriad of other health and fitness apps out there.

While the idea behind Health Connect was good, it lacked a lot of features at the start. Fortunately, Google has steadily made improvements to the Health Connect platform, most notably baking it into the OS with the Android 14 update. Now at Google I/O 2024, the company has announced a number of improvements to Health Connect that should make it even more useful.

During the “What’s new in Android Health” session, Google revealed that Health Connect will soon add support for history reads. Apps can currently only read the past 30 days worth of data that other apps have contributed to Health Connect. Limiting apps to the past 30 days of data made it so you couldn’t easily migrate your entire health data history from one app to another, so it’s good to see Google remove this limitation.

Another improvement to Health Connect is the ability for apps to do background reads. This enables apps to read data from Health Connect while they’re in the background. Currently, apps need to either run a foreground service (which requires showing a persistent notification) or wait for the user to open them before they can sync with Health Connect.

Google says that both the background reads and history reads capabilities are locked behind new permissions. The Health Connect app has added two new runtime permissions, one for background reads and one for history reads, that the user needs to explicitly grant to apps. After granting approval, users can revoke access at any time through Health Connect’s settings.

These Health Connect updates are coming later this year. Google didn’t say exactly when, but I’ve already spotted evidence of these new permissions in the Health Connect app shipped in the Android 15 beta. It’s possible this update will roll out with the Android 15 release before being backported to Android 14 through a Google Play System Update and to earlier releases through an update to the Health Connect app on Google Play.

Your phone’s gallery has a lot of personal and sensitive content that you probably don’t want random people to have access to. Unfortunately, a lot of apps request access to your entire media gallery even though they might only need access to one or two items to do their job. Google created the Photo Picker API in Android 13 to solve this problem. The Photo Picker lets users choose exactly which media items to share with an app, making it more private by design. However, many developers have chosen to not use Android’s Photo Picker for various reasons.

One reason that many developers eschewed the Photo Picker is that it’s missing a lot of features compared to the older system file picker it’s replacing. One of those features — cloud media support — was finally added not too long ago, meaning users can finally select media from their Google Photos libraries. But there’s still one more issue with the Photo Picker that cloud media integration only exacerbated: the lack of search.

Currently, the Photo Picker has two tabs: “Photos” and “Albums”. The Photos tab shows your photos and videos in reverse chronological order, while the Albums tab shows what’s in your Camera, Videos, Screenshots, Downloads, and Favorites albums. Unless you store tens of thousands of images locally, you probably won’t have trouble finding the exact photo or video you want to share using the Photo Picker. If you have a massive cloud media library like I do, though, then you’ll either need to be really organized with albums or hope you can quickly find the item you’re looking for while scrolling through your entire library.

It’s a huge bummer the Photo Picker doesn’t just let you search through your local and cloud libraries, especially since, well, it’s made by Google of all companies. Fortunately, Google will rectify this problem in an upcoming update to the Photo Picker. During the second day of Google I/O 2024, the company confirmed that the Photo Picker will support both local and cloud search. This is coming “later this year” apparently, but we don’t know exactly when.

When search support does roll out, it’ll hopefully be made available on all OS versions where the Photo Picker is available. The Photo Picker is available natively on all devices running Android 11 and newer through a Project Mainline module, but it’s also available on devices running Android 4.4 and newer thanks to Google Play Services. Hopefully the search bar in the Photo Picker will be as smart as the new AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature that Google unveiled the other day, but it’s unlikely that’ll be the case.

Earlier this week, we broke the news on an exciting new Google project that we uncovered: Ferrochrome. Ferrochrome is a special build of Chromium OS, the open source version of Chrome OS, that’s designed to run in a virtual machine alongside Android. In essence, this project would let you run Chrome OS on Android devices. We even managed to get it running on an actual Pixel phone! Sadly, Google confirmed to me that this project was basically just a fun proof of concept.

For a bit of context, I reported earlier this week that Google demonstrated Chromium OS running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8 at a “privately held event.” This “privately held event”, from what I was told, was a conference where Google showed off the latest capabilities of the Android platform to its closest Android partner companies. At the event, Google talked about the latest virtualization features in Android 15, and they capped things off by showing a demo of a Pixel 8 projecting Chromium OS onto an external monitor.

Given the context of the event and how this project was shown off, I suspected it was possible that Google merely used the Pixel 8 as a test bed for Android 15’s virtualization capabilities and that they had no intention of ever shipping Chrome OS on any of their own devices. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what seems to have happened.

While at Google I/O 2024, I had the opportunity to interview Sameer Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem, and Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform, about Google’s latest Android announcements. (This interview, which was conducted on the Android Faithful podcast for which I’m a co-host, can be found below.) During the interview, I asked them about the Ferrochrome project and whether Google has any plans for it to go anywhere.

In response, Dave Burke started off by bringing up some context. As I previously mentioned, Ferrochrome is made possible by the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a feature added in Android 13 that provides a secure and private execution environment for highly sensitive code. Burke brought up why this is necessary: Historically in Android, a lot of secure computing is done in something like TrustZone, which is a secure enclave on many ARM CPUs. However, he says that TrustZone isn’t as safe as virtual machines, which offer a cleaner, safer way to run compartmentalized secure code. Thus, over time, Google is working to move more and more code from TrustZone into virtual machines, and they’re constantly upgrading the Android Virtualization Framework to make it more and more capable.

In Android 15, Google updated the Android Virtualization Framework to support running graphical operating systems in a VM with GPU acceleration. To test and demonstrate this new capability for partners, Google had to pick a graphical operating system, and what better choice than the other operating system they already develop?

“And so then we were like, ‘we need to do a demo, what would be really cool?’ ‘Let’s put Chrome OS in there, that would be really funny!’ Like, like, could that really work? And it works! But that’s as far as it went. It’s a tech demo. What we’re excited about is the virtualization technology.”

— Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform, speaking on the Android Faithful podcast.

Sameet Samat followed up by mentioning that this was a “really cool challenge” for the team to solve to really push the new capability. As to whether this project was going anywhere, Samat said that “a lot of things in Google start like this,” where someone thinks of a cool way to demonstrate some new capability. That’s where project Ferrochrome is at right now, sadly. It’s a really, really cool tech demo to show off the enhanced virtualization capabilities of Android 15.

I really wish it was more than that, though. When I first heard of Ferrochrome, I was more excited by it than anything I expected to come from I/O. I was far from alone in my excitement, as Android Authority’s own Rita El Khoury penned an editorial about how Chrome OS on Android could be a game-changer. The response I got on social media following the publication of my posts was also quite lively, with many hoping that Google will actually ship this project on a future device.

I let Dave Burke and Sameer Samat know what the community thinks of Chrome OS on Android, and while I don’t know if they’ll change their mind on the subject, I’m hoping they’ll explore the idea more in the future.

When Google launched its Find My Device network last month, it mentioned that it was rolling out to Android devices globally, starting in the United States and Canada. It’s understandable that Google is staggering the rollout of a feature as significant as the Find My Device network since it needs some buffer time to catch any bugs that pop up before the rollout reaches a critical mass. But it’s also disappointing since it means that power users outside of the US and Canada — like many Android Authority readers — must wait even longer to get a feature they’ve already been waiting on for nearly a year. Thankfully, though, it appears that Google is finally starting to roll out the Find My Device network outside of North America, at least to some users.

If you haven’t heard, Google first announced the Find My Device network all the way back in May 2023 during that year’s I/O developer conference. Before the launch of the Find My Device network, devices needed to self-report their location to Google’s Find My Device service. That meant lost offline devices could only be located by their last known location. The Find My Device network, on the other hand, allows lost devices to be located even if they’re offline. This is possible because billions of Android devices can report each others’ locations.

Although Bluetooth LE Audio was announced at the beginning of 2020, there still aren’t that many audio products on the market that support it. In 2024, though, we’re finally seeing many audio products come on the market with LE Audio support either out of the box or soon in a future update. However, to actually take advantage of LE Audio’s numerous benefits and new features, you need to own a mobile device or PC that supports the standard. Unfortunately, if you own a Google Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, or Pixel 6a, then you may need to upgrade your phone entirely to use Bluetooth LE Audio.

When you connect your phone to a pair of wireless earbuds, the source device (your phone) and the sink device (your wireless earbuds) establish a connection via their Bluetooth radios. During the pairing process, the devices negotiate to find out what profiles they both support. These profiles define how the two devices exchange data. The profile typically used for streaming audio from the source to the sink device over Bluetooth is called the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP). The exact codec that’s used to store the audio data that’s transmitted between the two devices depends on what codecs both devices support, but at a minimum, both devices must support the low-complexity subband codec (SBC).

Since its inception, the Pixel lineup has omitted display output as a feature for reasons on which we can only speculate. However, Google finally changed gears with its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which have hardware support for display output via their USB-C ports. Neither phone in the Pixel 8 series launched with display output enabled out of the box, though. Instead, Google quietly enabled display output on the Pixel 8 in an Android beta update. Similarly, Google’s brand new Pixel 8a smartphone doesn’t ship with display output enabled out of the box, but this feature will likely be coming in next month’s software update.

The Google Pixel 8a, like the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, is powered by Google’s Tensor G3 chipset. Thus, it’s no surprise that all three phones share a lot of internal components, such as their USB controller. Although Google wired up the USB-C port on all three phones at the factory to support sending a DisplayPort Alternate Mode signal over a connected USB-C cable, the company disabled this capability using a software flag. The system property persist.vendor.usb.displayport.enabled is read by the USB initialization file for all Tensor G3-series devices, and if the property is set to 0, then DisplayPort Alternate Mode is disabled.

Google’s Find My Device network finally launched last month, and although its rollout has been slow and limited to the United States and Canada so far, there’s a lot to look forward to. Once fully rolled out globally, the Find My Device network will help billions of Android users find their lost devices. Select Android devices like the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro can be located through the Find My Device network even when powered off or out of battery. This is made possible by specialized hardware on the Pixel 8 series, which means it can’t be enabled through an over-the-air update on other devices. Thankfully, it looks like Google’s newly launched Pixel 8a will also support this feature.

The way that Google’s Find My Device network works is basically as follows. Android devices that contribute to the Find My Device network broadcast a beacon over Bluetooth that other nearby Android devices can pick up on. The devices that pick up this beacon then encrypt the location of the broadcasting device and upload it to Google’s servers. Location data is end-to-end encrypted with a key that’s only accessible to the broadcasting device’s owner and whoever the owner shared the location of that device with.

Yesterday, Google surprised the tech world by announcing its new Pixel 8a smartphone a week before its upcoming I/O event. The Pixel 8a bears a lot of similarities to the Pixel 8, from its seven years of software updates to its slew of Google AI features. One AI feature that’s currently exclusive to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, though, is Google’s AI wallpaper generator. That feature is coming to the cheaper Pixel 8a, however.

After announcing its AI wallpaper generator at last year’s I/O event, Google debuted the app on its Pixel 8 series released last fall. The app uses the power of generative AI to create completely new wallpapers based on certain themes and keywords.

If you don’t like the stock camera app that came with your Android device, there are a lot of third-party camera apps for Android you can try. These third-party camera apps often add advanced, pro-level camera controls and filters you won’t find in the stock camera app. On the flip side, they usually lack some of the basic features offered by the OEM’s camera app. The solution to this is for the OEM to package its features into an “extension” that third-party camera apps can use. Android currently supports five different types of extensions, but the upcoming Android 15 update could add support for a sixth extension called Eyes Free videography.

Under the hood, every camera app — whether it be the OEM stock app or a third-party app — is built on top of Android’s Camera2 API (the Jetpack support library called CameraX is a wrapper for Camera2). The Camera2 Extensions API provides a way for camera apps to access extensions that OEMs have implemented on their devices. As of Android 14, the Camera2 Extensions API supports the following five types of extensions:

When Google launched its Find My Device network last month, it mentioned that it was rolling out to Android devices globally, starting in the United States and Canada. It’s understandable that Google is staggering the rollout of a feature as significant as the Find My Device network since it needs some buffer time to catch any bugs that pop up before the rollout reaches a critical mass. But it’s also disappointing since it means that power users outside of the US and Canada — like many Android Authority readers — must wait even longer to get a feature they’ve already been waiting on for nearly a year. Thankfully, though, it appears that Google is finally starting to roll out the Find My Device network outside of North America, at least to some users.

If you haven’t heard, Google first announced the Find My Device network all the way back in May 2023 during that year’s I/O developer conference. Before the launch of the Find My Device network, devices needed to self-report their location to Google’s Find My Device service. That meant lost offline devices could only be located by their last known location. The Find My Device network, on the other hand, allows lost devices to be located even if they’re offline. This is possible because billions of Android devices can report each others’ locations.

Since its inception, the Pixel lineup has omitted display output as a feature for reasons on which we can only speculate. However, Google finally changed gears with its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which have hardware support for display output via their USB-C ports. Neither phone in the Pixel 8 series launched with display output enabled out of the box, though. Instead, Google quietly enabled display output on the Pixel 8 in an Android beta update. Similarly, Google’s brand new Pixel 8a smartphone doesn’t ship with display output enabled out of the box, but this feature will likely be coming in next month’s software update.

The Google Pixel 8a, like the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, is powered by Google’s Tensor G3 chipset. Thus, it’s no surprise that all three phones share a lot of internal components, such as their USB controller. Although Google wired up the USB-C port on all three phones at the factory to support sending a DisplayPort Alternate Mode signal over a connected USB-C cable, the company disabled this capability using a software flag. The system property persist.vendor.usb.displayport.enabled is read by the USB initialization file for all Tensor G3-series devices, and if the property is set to 0, then DisplayPort Alternate Mode is disabled.

Google’s Find My Device network finally launched last month, and although its rollout has been slow and limited to the United States and Canada so far, there’s a lot to look forward to. Once fully rolled out globally, the Find My Device network will help billions of Android users find their lost devices. Select Android devices like the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro can be located through the Find My Device network even when powered off or out of battery. This is made possible by specialized hardware on the Pixel 8 series, which means it can’t be enabled through an over-the-air update on other devices. Thankfully, it looks like Google’s newly launched Pixel 8a will also support this feature.

The way that Google’s Find My Device network works is basically as follows. Android devices that contribute to the Find My Device network broadcast a beacon over Bluetooth that other nearby Android devices can pick up on. The devices that pick up this beacon then encrypt the location of the broadcasting device and upload it to Google’s servers. Location data is end-to-end encrypted with a key that’s only accessible to the broadcasting device’s owner and whoever the owner shared the location of that device with.

Yesterday, Google surprised the tech world by announcing its new Pixel 8a smartphone a week before its upcoming I/O event. The Pixel 8a bears a lot of similarities to the Pixel 8, from its seven years of software updates to its slew of Google AI features. One AI feature that’s currently exclusive to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, though, is Google’s AI wallpaper generator. That feature is coming to the cheaper Pixel 8a, however.

After announcing its AI wallpaper generator at last year’s I/O event, Google debuted the app on its Pixel 8 series released last fall. The app uses the power of generative AI to create completely new wallpapers based on certain themes and keywords.

If you don’t like the stock camera app that came with your Android device, there are a lot of third-party camera apps for Android you can try. These third-party camera apps often add advanced, pro-level camera controls and filters you won’t find in the stock camera app. On the flip side, they usually lack some of the basic features offered by the OEM’s camera app. The solution to this is for the OEM to package its features into an “extension” that third-party camera apps can use. Android currently supports five different types of extensions, but the upcoming Android 15 update could add support for a sixth extension called Eyes Free videography.

Under the hood, every camera app — whether it be the OEM stock app or a third-party app — is built on top of Android’s Camera2 API (the Jetpack support library called CameraX is a wrapper for Camera2). The Camera2 Extensions API provides a way for camera apps to access extensions that OEMs have implemented on their devices. As of Android 14, the Camera2 Extensions API supports the following five types of extensions:

Android is used by billions of people worldwide, so it’s no wonder that accessibility is a key concern for Google. The company has developed several accessibility tools for its mobile operating system, including the Android Accessibility Suite, which offers a built-in select-to-speak function, a screen reader tool, additional navigation options, and more. Google also baked several accessibility features right into the OS, such as text and display scaling, color correction, and screen magnification. Screen magnification can currently be activated in one of three ways, though a fourth option is being added in the upcoming Android 15 update.

Screen magnification — not to be confused with the Pixel-exclusive Magnifier app, which allows you to use the camera to see real-world objects that are small or far away — is a native feature of the Android operating system that zooms in on the screen to make elements easier to see. It’s found under Settings > Accessibility > Magnification (at least on Pixel devices) and can be set up to magnify either the entire screen or a specific area of interest. It’s an especially nifty tool for anyone who has difficulty seeing, which is why Android offers a couple of methods to activate it on demand.

These activation methods, which can be found under the “magnification shortcut” submenu, currently include an on-screen accessibility button, a gesture that involves pressing and holding down both volume keys, and a gesture that involves quickly tapping the screen three times. The first method is the most convenient but takes up part of the screen and always magnifies the center. The second method doesn’t take up space on-screen but has the longest activation time. The third method is really convenient and also lets you zoom in on the exact part of the screen you want to magnify, but it also slows down your device since Android has to add a delay to every screen tap.

The new, fourth activation method for screen magnification — currently being developed for Android 15 — will let users quickly tap the screen two times with two fingers to zoom in. This new “two-finger double-tap screen” magnification shortcut isn’t visible yet in the latest Android 15 Beta 1.2 release, but we managed to surface the toggle manually, as shown below. This toggle is shown above the collapsed-by-default “advanced” dropdown, which currently contains the “triple-tap screen” shortcut. The likely reason that Google hid the triple-tap screen shortcut under a dropdown is that it slows down other tap inputs, as mentioned before. Its description even warns that “this shortcut may slow down your device.”

Interestingly, this text is missing from the description for the two-finger double-tap screen shortcut, suggesting it won’t slow down your device. However, in our brief testing, we noticed that there’s still a slight delay in screen taps when it’s enabled. This could be because the feature isn’t finished, or it’s actually working as intended, and Google just hasn’t updated the description to reflect the behavior. Either way, users who rely on Android’s screen magnification feature should look forward to the Android 15 update and its numerous accessibility improvements.

When Google launched its Find My Device network last month, it mentioned that it was rolling out to Android devices globally, starting in the United States and Canada. It’s understandable that Google is staggering the rollout of a feature as significant as the Find My Device network since it needs some buffer time to catch any bugs that pop up before the rollout reaches a critical mass. But it’s also disappointing since it means that power users outside of the US and Canada — like many Android Authority readers — must wait even longer to get a feature they’ve already been waiting on for nearly a year. Thankfully, though, it appears that Google is finally starting to roll out the Find My Device network outside of North America, at least to some users.

If you haven’t heard, Google first announced the Find My Device network all the way back in May 2023 during that year’s I/O developer conference. Before the launch of the Find My Device network, devices needed to self-report their location to Google’s Find My Device service. That meant lost offline devices could only be located by their last known location. The Find My Device network, on the other hand, allows lost devices to be located even if they’re offline. This is possible because billions of Android devices can report each others’ locations.

Although Bluetooth LE Audio was announced at the beginning of 2020, there still aren’t that many audio products on the market that support it. In 2024, though, we’re finally seeing many audio products come on the market with LE Audio support either out of the box or soon in a future update. However, to actually take advantage of LE Audio’s numerous benefits and new features, you need to own a mobile device or PC that supports the standard. Unfortunately, if you own a Google Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, or Pixel 6a, then you may need to upgrade your phone entirely to use Bluetooth LE Audio.

When you connect your phone to a pair of wireless earbuds, the source device (your phone) and the sink device (your wireless earbuds) establish a connection via their Bluetooth radios. During the pairing process, the devices negotiate to find out what profiles they both support. These profiles define how the two devices exchange data. The profile typically used for streaming audio from the source to the sink device over Bluetooth is called the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP). The exact codec that’s used to store the audio data that’s transmitted between the two devices depends on what codecs both devices support, but at a minimum, both devices must support the low-complexity subband codec (SBC).

Since its inception, the Pixel lineup has omitted display output as a feature for reasons on which we can only speculate. However, Google finally changed gears with its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which have hardware support for display output via their USB-C ports. Neither phone in the Pixel 8 series launched with display output enabled out of the box, though. Instead, Google quietly enabled display output on the Pixel 8 in an Android beta update. Similarly, Google’s brand new Pixel 8a smartphone doesn’t ship with display output enabled out of the box, but this feature will likely be coming in next month’s software update.

The Google Pixel 8a, like the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, is powered by Google’s Tensor G3 chipset. Thus, it’s no surprise that all three phones share a lot of internal components, such as their USB controller. Although Google wired up the USB-C port on all three phones at the factory to support sending a DisplayPort Alternate Mode signal over a connected USB-C cable, the company disabled this capability using a software flag. The system property persist.vendor.usb.displayport.enabled is read by the USB initialization file for all Tensor G3-series devices, and if the property is set to 0, then DisplayPort Alternate Mode is disabled.

Google’s Find My Device network finally launched last month, and although its rollout has been slow and limited to the United States and Canada so far, there’s a lot to look forward to. Once fully rolled out globally, the Find My Device network will help billions of Android users find their lost devices. Select Android devices like the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro can be located through the Find My Device network even when powered off or out of battery. This is made possible by specialized hardware on the Pixel 8 series, which means it can’t be enabled through an over-the-air update on other devices. Thankfully, it looks like Google’s newly launched Pixel 8a will also support this feature.

The way that Google’s Find My Device network works is basically as follows. Android devices that contribute to the Find My Device network broadcast a beacon over Bluetooth that other nearby Android devices can pick up on. The devices that pick up this beacon then encrypt the location of the broadcasting device and upload it to Google’s servers. Location data is end-to-end encrypted with a key that’s only accessible to the broadcasting device’s owner and whoever the owner shared the location of that device with.

Yesterday, Google surprised the tech world by announcing its new Pixel 8a smartphone a week before its upcoming I/O event. The Pixel 8a bears a lot of similarities to the Pixel 8, from its seven years of software updates to its slew of Google AI features. One AI feature that’s currently exclusive to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, though, is Google’s AI wallpaper generator. That feature is coming to the cheaper Pixel 8a, however.

After announcing its AI wallpaper generator at last year’s I/O event, Google debuted the app on its Pixel 8 series released last fall. The app uses the power of generative AI to create completely new wallpapers based on certain themes and keywords.

If you don’t like the stock camera app that came with your Android device, there are a lot of third-party camera apps for Android you can try. These third-party camera apps often add advanced, pro-level camera controls and filters you won’t find in the stock camera app. On the flip side, they usually lack some of the basic features offered by the OEM’s camera app. The solution to this is for the OEM to package its features into an “extension” that third-party camera apps can use. Android currently supports five different types of extensions, but the upcoming Android 15 update could add support for a sixth extension called Eyes Free videography.

Under the hood, every camera app — whether it be the OEM stock app or a third-party app — is built on top of Android’s Camera2 API (the Jetpack support library called CameraX is a wrapper for Camera2). The Camera2 Extensions API provides a way for camera apps to access extensions that OEMs have implemented on their devices. As of Android 14, the Camera2 Extensions API supports the following five types of extensions:

Android is used by billions of people worldwide, so it’s no wonder that accessibility is a key concern for Google. The company has developed several accessibility tools for its mobile operating system, including the Android Accessibility Suite, which offers a built-in select-to-speak function, a screen reader tool, additional navigation options, and more. Google also baked several accessibility features right into the OS, such as text and display scaling, color correction, and screen magnification. Screen magnification can currently be activated in one of three ways, though a fourth option is being added in the upcoming Android 15 update.

Screen magnification — not to be confused with the Pixel-exclusive Magnifier app, which allows you to use the camera to see real-world objects that are small or far away — is a native feature of the Android operating system that zooms in on the screen to make elements easier to see. It’s found under Settings > Accessibility > Magnification (at least on Pixel devices) and can be set up to magnify either the entire screen or a specific area of interest. It’s an especially nifty tool for anyone who has difficulty seeing, which is why Android offers a couple of methods to activate it on demand.

These activation methods, which can be found under the “magnification shortcut” submenu, currently include an on-screen accessibility button, a gesture that involves pressing and holding down both volume keys, and a gesture that involves quickly tapping the screen three times. The first method is the most convenient but takes up part of the screen and always magnifies the center. The second method doesn’t take up space on-screen but has the longest activation time. The third method is really convenient and also lets you zoom in on the exact part of the screen you want to magnify, but it also slows down your device since Android has to add a delay to every screen tap.

The new, fourth activation method for screen magnification — currently being developed for Android 15 — will let users quickly tap the screen two times with two fingers to zoom in. This new “two-finger double-tap screen” magnification shortcut isn’t visible yet in the latest Android 15 Beta 1.2 release, but we managed to surface the toggle manually, as shown below. This toggle is shown above the collapsed-by-default “advanced” dropdown, which currently contains the “triple-tap screen” shortcut. The likely reason that Google hid the triple-tap screen shortcut under a dropdown is that it slows down other tap inputs, as mentioned before. Its description even warns that “this shortcut may slow down your device.”

Interestingly, this text is missing from the description for the two-finger double-tap screen shortcut, suggesting it won’t slow down your device. However, in our brief testing, we noticed that there’s still a slight delay in screen taps when it’s enabled. This could be because the feature isn’t finished, or it’s actually working as intended, and Google just hasn’t updated the description to reflect the behavior. Either way, users who rely on Android’s screen magnification feature should look forward to the Android 15 update and its numerous accessibility improvements.

Over the last few years, Google has been hard at work improving the experience of using Android on large-screen devices. It released its first tablet-oriented OS update in years, Android 12L, in early 2022, and every new OS update since has included incremental improvements to the large-screen experience. Last year’s Android 14 release was no different, adding features like an improved taskbar and the ability to force apps to adopt a specific aspect ratio. Although these two changes were added in quarterly feature updates to Android 14, there was one change introduced in Android 14’s initial release that slipped under the radar until now: a revamped Alt+Tab experience.

In Android 13 and earlier, pressing Alt+Tab on a Bluetooth or USB keyboard connected to an Android tablet or other large-screen device would simply bring up Android’s recents screen. While you could cycle through apps by pressing the Tab key while continuing to hold down Alt, there wasn’t a visual cue that showed you which app you selected. Furthermore, quickly pressing Alt+Tab wouldn’t switch to the most recently used app; instead, it would briefly flash the recents screen and then return to the current app. Compared to desktop operating systems, the way Android handled Alt+Tab presses made for a clunky multitasking experience.

Circle to Search is one of the best features that Google has released in years. The company knows it, too, which is why it’s been advertising the feature everywhere. Circle to Search allows you to quickly highlight some text or images on your screen, and it will then search for that info on Google. The company has been slowly rolling out the feature to more and more devices since the original announcement, and now it’s making its way to the company’s Pixel Tablet.

After debuting on the Samsung Galaxy S24 series in mid-January, Circle to Search quickly made its way over to the Google Pixel 8 series via a surprise Pixel Feature Drop that very same month. The feature remained exclusive to Google’s and Samsung’s latest flagship phones until late March, which is when Google rolled it out to its own Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, and Pixel 7a. Meanwhile, Samsung rolled out its big Galaxy AI feature update to the Galaxy S23 series, Galaxy Z Flip 5, Galaxy Z Fold 5, and Galaxy Tab S9 series.

Update: May 1, 2024 (1:01 AM ET): Rabbit has reached out to Android Authority with a statement from its founder and CEO, Jesse Lyu. The statement argues that the R1’s interface is not an app. The company explains that the LLM it uses runs on the cloud, which is something we never questioned. We’ll be following up with another article diving deeper into the subject soon. Until then, you can read Rabbit’s complete statement below.

“rabbit r1 is not an Android app. We are aware there are some unofficial rabbit OS app/website emulators out there. We understand the passion that people have to get a taste of our AI and LAM instead of waiting for their r1 to arrive. That being said, to clear any misunderstanding and set the record straight, rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications, therefore a local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints won’t be able to access our service. rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third-party clients. Using a bootlegged APK or webclient carries significant risks; malicious actors are known to publish bootlegged apps that steal your data. For this reason, we recommend that users avoid these bootlegged rabbit OS apps.”

Although Google designed Android’s UI to scale on both phones and tablets properly, it optimized the UI to look best in portrait mode for phones and landscape mode for tablets. That makes the most sense since phones are naturally meant to be held in portrait mode and tablets in landscape mode, but there are times when you want to use either device in the opposite orientation. If you rotate your Android phone into landscape mode, though, you may notice that certain system UI elements like the lock screen and the notifications panel aren’t optimized, at least on stock Android. Fortunately, the Android 15 update could bring an optimized landscape layout for both the lock screen and the notifications panel on phones.

Before I showcase the new lock screen and notifications panel layouts, I want to mention how they look in the current stock Android 14 release. Since the lock screen can’t rotate at all in stock Android 14 on phones, there’s nothing for me to show there. In contrast, the notifications panel does have a landscape layout already in stock Android 14, albeit with some issues. For starters, there’s a lot of wasted space since two-thirds of the screen is reserved for notifications that only stretch to about half the width of the panel. The top third is taken up by a row of four Quick Settings tiles, which is fine, but other elements like the Quick Settings edit button, brightness slider, foreground services task manager, user switcher, settings shortcut, and power menu shortcut aren’t shown. These remaining elements are only shown when you fully expand the notifications panel, which requires another swipe down. Fortunately, Android at least manages to slot in the media player in the unexpanded state, but the downside is that there’s less room for notifications.

Late last month, we first reported that Google will revamp the system volume panel interface in the upcoming Android 15 release. The new design we enabled features much thicker, pill-shaped sliders all around, is collapsible, and has some playful animations for volume adjustments. Fast-forward one month, and the new volume panel UI we showed off has still not rolled out in the Android 15 beta. Thanks to a third-party app, though, you don’t need to wait any longer to try it out.

The developer of Precise Volume, one of the best volume control apps for Android, has released a new update that adds a new “Android 15 Preview” popup style for the app’s Volume Button Override feature. Basically, the Precise Volume app is capable of overriding the system’s stock volume panel UI and replacing it with its own. Before the latest beta update, the app’s only available popup style was based on the older volume panel UI from Android 14. After seeing our article on Android 15’s revamped volume panel UI, though, the developer decided to try their hand at replicating the new interface. Having tried both the official and the replicated experience, I can say the developer did a pretty good job at mimicking the new UI.