Android: Page 4

The Galaxy Z Fold7's preorder window closed July 24, 2025, the day before the phone launched. For buyers without a device to trade in, the Amazon Galaxy Z Fold7 preorder deal stood apart from the competition not because it carried the highest nominal credit value.

Samsung's "Free Double Storage" pre-order promotion may be about to cost buyers money. A report from Korean outlet Chosun claims Samsung will replace the Galaxy Z Fold 8 storage upgrade deal with a 50% subsidy, leaving Korean buyers paying an estimated 126,500 won—about $90 or £65 at current exchange rates—for the 256GB-to-512GB jump.

Chrome on Android scrolls nearly half as janky as it did three years ago. Google today published its most detailed account of how that happened, and the headline figure is specific: janky scroll frequency dropped 48% between 2023 and 2026, according to the Google Chromium blog. That metric measures how often Chrome fails to update the display before the screen refreshes a narrow, concrete definition, not a general claim about the browser feeling faster.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

In hands-on testing, PCMag found that the Gemini Daily Brief flagged two overlapping Airbnb reservations for the same weekend and warned of a potential duplicate YouTube Premium charge, both pulled unprompted from the tester's Gmail inbox. The example shows the feature's core pitch: usefulness through deep access to personal Google data. The broader implication is harder to dismiss than a single anecdote suggests.

Samsung's 2026 smartwatch lineup makes the buying decision unusually clear. The Galaxy Watch9 is the better fit for most buyers because it shares the Galaxy Watch Ultra2's processor, software, core sensors, and announced health features but starts at $320 less in the US. The Ultra2 primarily justifies its premium through longer battery life, stronger water protection, a brighter display, additional storage, and tools designed for trail sports and recreational diving.

A European pricing leak suggests Samsung will introduce two Galaxy Z Fold 8 models, including a new Ultra version that could cost as much as €2,799 with 1TB of storage.

Spider-Man is currently fighting ninjas in Long Island City, Queens, and the image sits inside Google Maps exactly the way any other street-level photograph does. Google confirmed it staged five scenes at real New York City locations as part of a promotion for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, describing them as "custom Spider-Man moments staged and captured as the Street View car happened upon Spider-Man in action," per PCMag. The campaign also includes spideytracker.com, a dedicated microsite built...

The latest Android on-device ADB changes under discussion at Google are not official yet, but they could reshape how Shizuku, LADB, and other local ADB tools work. According to a Kitsumed Blog post published last week summarizing an active Google IssueTracker thread, a core ADB maintainer discussed restricting which network interfaces the ADB daemon listens on a conversation triggered by CVE-2026-0073, a vulnerability that allowed wireless ADB's pairing authentication to be bypassed entirely...

Google's revamped Android 17 iOS migration tool for Pixel phones is live, and two Pixel generations that qualify for the OS can't use it. The updated Android Switch utility is limited to Pixel 8 and newer, plus a handful of Samsung foldables, leaving Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 owners with the OS update but none of the upgraded process's additional transfer capabilities. Pixel 8 owners fare only slightly better: they can access the tool exclusively during initial device setup.

Google says higher memory costs will force it to adjust prices across the Pixel family, including the upcoming Pixel 11 lineup. In a July 24 interview with 9to5Google, Google Vice President of Devices and Services Shakil Barkat said the company could no longer absorb all the increases coming from suppliers.

In early June 2025, Google Home stopped recognizing one of the most basic thermostat commands its users could issue. Say "turn off the thermostat" and the platform returned an error then suggested trying "turn off the thermostat." Google fixed the Google Home Nest Thermostat hands-free control issue within days, posting a resolution via the GoogleNestCommunity Reddit account on June 10, 2025. No public explanation of what caused it was ever offered.

Google Clock v9.0 is rolling out support for Google Clock Live Updates, surfacing active timers and stopwatches in the status bar, on the lock screen, and on the always-on display, Android Authority reported today. The update also fixes a specific bug: timers shown on the always-on display previously appeared frozen mid-count even while running in the background. Both changes arrive together.

Google has brought Gemini Live to the original Home Mini and first-generation Nest Hub, the two oldest devices its October 2025 rollout skipped. The July 23 update puts these aging speakers in the same tier as the Nest Mini, Nest Audio, and second-gen Nest Hub. Two things matter before anything else: accessing Gemini Live on any of these devices costs $10 a month, and the underlying assistant has drawn sharp criticism from independent reviewers.

A teardown of the latest Google Translate APK has surfaced a Google Translate live translate widget that starts real-time speech translation with a single tap and, based on code strings found in the build, keeps running after users leave the app. That combination of one-tap start and persistent background operation describes something meaningfully different from a shortcut.

Until last week, the Pixel 11 price increase was a rumor. It isn't anymore. Google's VP of Devices and Services, Shakil Barkat, told 9to5Google that the entire Pixel family will see pricing "adjustments" rolled out "dynamically to match supply realities" and that phones already on sale could be affected too, with no timeline given. Google is announcing the next Pixel generation on August 12, per The Verge. Specific numbers come then. The policy behind them is already set.

The hard part of working in Google Docs has never been writing the first sentence. It's everything that follows: reformatting a draft to match a template someone else built, fixing the voice after four contributors have left their fingerprints on it, finding an image that doesn't require a trip to another tool. Google has been shipping Gemini in Google Docs updates since March 2026 to handle most of that cleanup automatically, inside Docs, without changing the interface most users already know.

Google Play Store's July 2026 update quietly added two search changes to Android phones: the search input box now expands to two lines, and the store will begin showing natural language queries. Both entries appear in the v52.4 release notes covered by 9to5Google this week. What's confirmed is the interface change. What isn't confirmed is whether the underlying search engine can actually do more with a longer, descriptive query than it could with two keywords.

An Amazon listing surfaced the Pixel Buds Pro 2 in an unnamed dark green colorway this week before being pulled, and Android Authority reported today that Google also appears to have been showing the same shade on its Play Store rewards page. The Pixel 11 event is confirmed for August 12, two weeks away. The leak points to no hardware changes, only a new colorway.

The Galaxy S26 FE has turned up in the UL Demko certification database with confirmed support for 45W wired charging, a spec that would put Samsung's budget-oriented handset ahead of the base Galaxy S26, which is still expected to top out at 25W. The Galaxy S26 FE 45W charging leak covers six regional model numbers and aligns with Samsung's Super Fast Charging 2.0 standard, SamMobile and Android Headlines both reported this week. The same 45W ceiling appeared on the Galaxy S25 FE, meaning the...

Google's support page now states plainly that QR code pairing for Messages on the web is "no longer available in the US." On the same day that notice appeared, reporters at Android Authority pulled up the QR option in both the Android app and the browser without any trouble. That gap between what Google's documentation says and what users are actually seeing is where this story starts.

No ID scan, no selfie, no document upload. Google's answer to the wave of age-verification laws sweeping U.S. states and international regulators runs entirely on settings parents already control inside their family's Android account. This week, the company announced an expansion of its beta Google Play Age Signals API, moving past an initial test in Brazil into a broader international rollout, Ars Technica reported.

Tipster Ice Universe demonstrated Galaxy Z Fold 8 app-level display customization this week on a Chinese Fold 8 unit, showing YouTube's recommendation feed shift from two rows of videos to three after adjusting that single app's display size. Nothing else on the device changed. Samsung appears to be shipping this per-app zoom feature in One UI 9 ahead of the August 7 retail launch, according to Android Headlines, with the caveat that review units are not yet on final firmware and all...

Google Maps Platform opened a Private Preview yesterday for Google Maps Custom Satellite Embeddings, a service that lets organizations request AI-derived Earth data for specific regions on cycles as tight as every five days, according to Google Maps Platform. That's a sharp break from the annual dataset it builds on, but it is not a new feed of satellite photos.

Setting up a new Android phone follows the same ritual every time: sign in, wait for the data transfer, redownload the apps you actually use, click through permission prompts, and eventually get around to the security settings you meant to check weeks ago. It's tedious enough that AI-powered Android phone setup sounds like an obvious next step. Google hasn't shown that it's built one, and the gap between ambition and evidence is the story here.

The Galaxy Z Fold7 became Samsung's first book-style foldable to outsell its companion Flip model during a South Korean preorder period. Its share rose from roughly 40% in the previous generation to 60%, giving Samsung fresh evidence that buyers would choose the more expensive Fold when its design addressed the format's biggest usability problems.

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Fold8, Fold8 Ultra and Flip8 last week, marking the eighth generation of its foldable lineup. The most prominent display claim in Samsung's announcement is Samsung's pitch for the Fold8's new display proportions: the same unfolded panel reads as 4:3 in one orientation and 3:4 when turned 90 degrees. Samsung positions the 4:3 landscape view as suited to movies and games, and the 3:4 portrait view as suited to e-books and web browsing, according to the same...

A battery unit spotted in India's Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) database was an early piece of evidence pointing toward an unannounced Samsung earbud, according to an April report from Android Authority. Nothing in that listing, or in the app code that surfaced before it, confirms the Samsung ear-hook earbuds theory that has attached itself to the leak.

On July 30, Google marked a months-old bug "Fixed" in its public Issue Tracker. The ticket covers a specific idle-drain bug that Google says it fixed on selected Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 models, and the closure didn't sit well with everyone: more than 50 comments piled up underneath, largely from users saying their phones still drain overnight.

The Pixel Watch 5 has appeared in a Google Play Console listing under the codename "godric," adding to the evidence that Google's next smartwatch is nearing launch. The entry follows June regulatory filings for four probable Pixel Watch 5 models and reveals 3GB of RAM, up from 2GB in recent generations.

Razer Axon Wallpaper Engine Mobile is scheduled to hit Google Play on July 15, 2026, and Razer has built a two-phase hardware giveaway around the release that runs from July 3 through July 29. Nine prizes total, split across pre-registration and social entry windows, with the first draw already open, PR TIMES reported this week. What the app actually does remains largely undescribed in pre-launch materials but the campaign mechanics are concrete, and that's what most readers need to act on...

A leak posted today on X claims Samsung will open pre-reservations for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 as soon as July 8. The tip comes from a single source, Abhishek Yadav, and Samsung has not announced it. But a separate report noted that this year's pre-registration window is reportedly compressed to just a few days before the expected July 22 Unpacked event, 9to5Google reported two weeks ago, so the compressed timing fits. What matters before acting on that is understanding which device the reservation...

Google Wallet appears to be rolling out expanded transaction history for Android that includes payments made on paired Wear OS devices. For watch users, it closes a straightforward problem: the Android app previously showed only the 10 most recent tap-to-pay transactions from that specific phone, with Wear OS payments excluded entirely. Verifying a watch payment meant opening a browser, not the Wallet app.

Samsung Messages shut down on July 6, 2026. If you're a US Galaxy user on Android 12 or newer, the app can no longer send or receive messages except to emergency numbers, per Samsung's discontinuation notice. The text field is greyed out, and that's a permanent state.

Google Maps cannot place a restaurant order. That distinction matters, because the conversational discovery experience Google has built over the past eight months makes the question feel closer than it did before. A sequence of Gemini-powered feature launches hands-free navigation, AI-synthesized venue tips, multi-step voice queries has moved Maps from a directions app into something that finds restaurants, answers follow-up questions about them, and routes you there by voice. Whether ordering...

In late October 2025, Niagara Launcher published a support note that was, in its quiet way, a small admission of defeat. Google Play services had started blocking the launcher from opening certain Unity-made games a Niagara Launcher Google Play services issue the team could do nothing about. Not because of a Niagara bug. There was nothing to patch, nothing to push. According to the team's help page, it appeared that Google had rolled out new firewall rules in response to a Unity engine...

Leaked renders published two weeks ago show more than a Samsung Health facelift. Buried in the imagery is what appears to be a reworked watchface picker, a component that lives inside the Galaxy Wearable app, not Samsung Health, suggesting the Samsung Wearable app redesign may extend beyond the fitness tracking side of Samsung's software stack. Samsung has not confirmed any changes to the Wearable app.

At Google I/O in May, Google's director of product management for the Home Platform published a blog post describing the company's ambitions with a phrase you'd expect from a B2B sales deck: enabling partners to build "monetizable, proactive services" for customers' homes. That's not consumer language. It's licensing language. And it's the clearest signal yet about where the Google Home future is heading designed around carriers, ISPs, and security companies, with consumers as the end market...

The UK government is drawing up legislation that would require YouTube and other video platforms to make public service broadcaster content prominently discoverable, Deadline reported two weeks ago. Under the proposed Media Bill, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Paramount-owned 5 would be named beneficiaries. In practical terms, that could mean boosting official clips from shows like Question Time in user feeds and search results, though exactly which surfaces would be covered remains publicly...

Samsung's cardiovascular health story for Galaxy Watch has quietly changed direction. Samsung's June 4 Samsung Health preview emphasized new AI health tools, while a later Samsung Health notice positioned Blood Pressure Trends as the U.S. replacement for Vascular Load. It has not issued a broad public announcement, but Samsung Health is reportedly notifying U.S. users that Vascular Load will disappear with Samsung Health v7.0 and One UI 9 Watch.