Android: Page 8

A tipster with a decent track record has told SamMobile today that Samsung plans to announce the Galaxy Tab S12 Plus and Tab S12 Ultra in September 2026, placing the Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Plus and Ultra launch date roughly two months out. That claim lands on top of independent projections from Trusted Reviews and Notebookcheck, both of which flagged late summer 2026 five months ago based on Samsung's previous release patterns. Three outlets arriving at the same window by different routes is...

Samsung has published teaser imagery showing a book-style foldable device with a visibly wider unfolded profile than its current Fold lineup. No display dimensions, pricing, product name, or launch date have been confirmed. What the imagery establishes is a visual direction. What remains unconfirmed is everything else.

Samsung Messages stops working this month for most US Galaxy phone users on Android 12 or higher. Samsung's US support page cited July 6 as the shutdown date, according to PhoneArena, though Samsung's own end-of-service announcement directs users to check the app itself for their exact device-specific cutoff. Either way, the deadline is here.

Samsung may have accidentally surfaced the date for its next Galaxy Unpacked event. The Samsung Members app in Malaysia served up vouchers this week tied to unannounced foldables and wearables, both redeemable starting July 22 a date that an independent report had already named as the probable Unpacked window nearly two months earlier. No official invitation has been issued, but the convergence of a Samsung-operated promotional system and a prior independent report on the same specific date...

When an Android user selects a photo through Google's Photo Picker and shares it with an app, any GPS coordinates embedded in that image are removed. No prompt, no toggle, no acknowledgment that anything was stripped. For most use cases, that's a reasonable default. For apps where geotags are the core functionality — a hiking tracker, a travel journal, a location-aware social platform — it's a capability failure that neither the user nor the developer can fix.

Some Google Home and Google Nest speakers are refusing to respond or taking unusually long to do so, with multiple users reporting the same failure pattern, and the symptom profile points more toward a possible backend service disruption than widespread broken hardware, Android Police reports. The scope remains unclear, but the reports are specific enough to be diagnostically useful.

Ice Universe is claiming the wider Galaxy Z Fold 8 will weigh just 201g, undercutting the 215g Fold 7 and the 229g Huawei Pura X Max, Android Authority reported four weeks ago. That Galaxy Z Fold 8 specs leak would make Samsung's wide model dramatically lighter than anything the company has shipped in the foldable category. A second leaker who reportedly handled the hardware called the weight "unbelievable" and said the device "feels like a new beginning," 9to5Google reported last week.

Google has shut down the Tenor API today, and platforms including X, Discord, WhatsApp, and Bluesky that built GIF search into their products using it are now scrambling for replacements. The Google Tenor API shutdown doesn't touch Tenor's website or its integrations inside Google's own apps. What ends today is third-party access, full stop.

Google has confirmed a new foldable gaming mode for Android 17 that splits a foldable's inner display into gameplay on top and a virtual gamepad on the bottom. The catch: It was not included in the stable Android 17 release that began rolling out to Pixel devices on June 16, 2026.

Google's Gemini note-taker in Meet is now available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the company announced today, extending a feature that had previously been limited to eligible Workspace business customers. The Google Meet Gemini note-taker goes live immediately on web and mobile, in select languages, for meetings the subscriber hosts.

Google is rolling out a stable Android 17 OTA to Beta 4 and Beta 4.1 users, designed to move them off the beta program without wiping their data. Some Beta 4.1 devices still haven't received it, and the Android 17 Beta 4.1 stable OTA delay now carries a concrete hazard: Android Authority warned this week that Beta 4.1 users should avoid the latest Google Play System update because it can cause a bootloop, a failure state where the phone cycles through restarts and never fully loads the OS. The...

Last Wednesday, two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela in quick succession a 7.2 followed seconds later by a 7.5 and many Venezuelans say their Android phones buzzed with warnings before the ground moved. That claim is the center of this article. Not because it proves lives were saved, but because it raises a pointed question: did a consumer smartphone feature just serve as de facto early-warning infrastructure in a country that has none of the conventional kind?

Survey data suggests most mobile users reading this on a phone are doing so against a dark background though the more interesting question is why. A 2026 mixed-method study surveying 215 mobile users found that roughly 68% reported an overall dark mode preference, with the sample skewing young (mean age 24.3) and recruited in Vietnam, so treat the figures as directional rather than universal (Hazadi & Kamaruzaman, Journal of Mobile Studies). What gives them weight is the contextual breakdown:...

Searches for a "Google Signature app for Android" surface a real, documented product just not a standalone app. Google's documented signing workflow lives inside Google Docs and Drive, restricted to Workspace subscribers, handling the full signature request lifecycle without leaving the document environment. The other Android "signature" system is a developer security mechanism for app distribution, unrelated to contracts or PDFs.

Google has begun notifying users that Fitbit app versions older than 5.0 will stop being supported on Android and iOS on July 15, 2026, ending a workaround some holdouts used to avoid the Google Health redesign.

After months of Pixel bootloop complaints tied to Google's March, April, and May 2026 software updates, Google has not issued a universal over-the-air fix for affected phones.

Samsung is ending free access to its SmartThings API in October, and the users who will feel it are not the millions running the standard SmartThings app. They're the technically engaged users who built custom setups on top of the free API, and some of them have no practical way around the new Samsung SmartThings API fees. Android Authority confirmed this week that paid tiers take effect in October, including a $4.99-per-month personal plan for non-commercial individual developers, with free...

A reviewed OnePlus Nord 6 package included an 80W SuperVOOC charger, a red charging cable, and a color-matched silicone case, according to GSMArena's early review unit writeup. That accessory set stands out because the Nord 6 uses OnePlus' proprietary fast-charging system, so the included adapter is the box item most likely to affect day-one performance.

LibrePods for Android v0.2.3: Easier Install, Root Still Required

Google Photos is adding a top-level toggle to disable Ask Photos directly from the Search tab, Ars Technica reported earlier this year. The change follows user complaints about the Gemini-powered search experience, and Google Photos head Shimrit Ben-Yair went on record about it, saying the company "has heard the complaints." Until the toggle ships, turning off Ask Photos still requires navigating three levels into the app's settings.

A Google Play System update currently available to Pixel devices can render phones running Android 17 beta 4.1 completely unusable, trapping them in a reboot loop with no clean way out. The Android 17 beta 4.1 Play System update bootloop issue was flagged today by Android Authority, after multiple Pixel owners reported their devices never recovered after the update completed.

Google began pushing the first Fitbit Air firmware update today, roughly seven weeks after the tracker went on sale, and the timing is not coincidental. The release follows a sustained wave of user complaints about the device's two most fundamental jobs: counting steps and tracking sleep. The update (version 20001.253.2 on iOS, 67.20001.253.2 on Android) is rolling out gradually via the Google Health app, according to Android Authority.

Google's new Home Speaker is finally here, and the first reviews point to a clear trade-off: this is a Gemini-first smart home device, not a straightforward Nest Audio replacement.

Samsung pushed One UI 7 theft-protection features to the Galaxy S23 series last year, a move that signals the company is still treating older flagships as active hardware worth securing. For S23 owners, the more immediate question is whether the most consequential security feature already on their phone, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Auto Blocker update, is actually switched on. It probably is. But "probably" is worth verifying.

Making a polished YouTube Short used to mean leaving the app. Record, export to CapCut, cut to the beat by hand, add text and stickers, import back to YouTube. The native tools weren't built for that kind of precision. YouTube has spent the past year pushing a sequence of changes aimed at eliminating that round trip, and the updates are substantive enough to map carefully.

Budget smartphones involve a series of small surrenders. Most of them fade. The plastic chassis stops registering after a few days. The middling processor becomes invisible when the phone handles what you actually ask it to do. But a weak screen never stops being a weak screen. Every scroll, every video, every glance at a notification is a reminder of the trade-off you made.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE Plus is currently on sale for $434, down $216 from its $649.99 list price. That discount matters because the FE line's value proposition has always depended on price and at $649.99, the case for buying was genuinely mixed.

A poll embedded in an Android Authority column from last month drew 7,036 votes on a single question: are you satisfied with the Galaxy S26 Ultra Privacy Display? Strip out the 35% who hadn't used the phone, and 68% of actual owners said yes. That's the strongest positive signal yet for Samsung's most debated flagship feature, and it tells a more specific story than it first appears.

The story that the Chrome ad blocker update would kill your ad blocker was wrong. A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies by researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt tested MV3 versions of four major blockers against their MV2 predecessors, using default settings to replicate what a typical user actually runs. The result: no statistically significant reduction in blocking effectiveness. The MV3 versions actually blocked marginally...

Samsung Display filed a patent in January describing a specific engineering fix for one of the trickiest reliability problems in OLED manufacturing. The filing, US 2026/0136779 A1, covers a groove-and-seal architecture designed to stop moisture from degrading a panel at the camera cutout edge. It is about punch-hole cutout durability, not under-display cameras. That distinction matters, because it arrives as tipster reporting suggests Samsung's UDC program may be running out of road, according...

A leaked Android 17 build suggests Google could be adding two significant upgrades to how Pixel phones handle color: a free-form accent color picker that would replace the current preset system, and a set of system-wide intensity presets controlling how aggressively those colors spread across the UI. Android Authority reported the leak last month. Neither feature has appeared in any public Android 17 build, and when Google might ship them remains unconfirmed.

Google is testing a Chrome behavior that would send every non-URL address-bar search query straight into AI Mode, bypassing standard Search entirely. The Google Search AI Mode Chrome test surfaced in the Canary build earlier this month, and while Google moved quickly to call it an accident, its existence lands at an awkward moment: a federal court has spent the last year dismantling the exact kind of default-setting arrangements that would make such a feature legally sensitive.

Samsung announced the Galaxy A27 5G today with confirmed specs, a July 3 release date, and no official pricing. What does exist on the pricing front is a leak: figures attributed to Roland Quandt, circulated two weeks ago by Notebookcheck and IntoMobile, put the A27 at €349 and €439 for the two main storage tiers. If those numbers hold, that's a €50 increase over what the Galaxy A26 cost at launch. Samsung has not confirmed them. GSMArena's launch coverage published today notes prices are still...

Some Pixel owners running Android 17 are reporting erratic touchscreen behavior, with users reporting screens that stop responding to touch entirely or scroll in the opposite direction of their swipe. Google has acknowledged reports through an official PixelCommunity Reddit account and suggested troubleshooting steps, but has not identified the root cause or provided a patch timeline, Android Authority reported.

Samsung announced what it describes as the industry's first UFS 5.0 storage chip, with sequential read speeds of 10.8 GB/s and write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. That's more than double the throughput of the UFS 4.1 standard found in current flagship Android phones, according to HotHardware. Samsung is framing the chip not just as a speed upgrade but as infrastructure for running AI models directly on a device, without a cloud connection.

Google Messages may finally be fixing one of its most complained-about limitations. Researchers at Android Authority enabled a bulk forwarding feature inside the latest beta build, walking through the complete flow end to end: select multiple texts and images, tap a new overflow menu, preview the batch, and send. The feature is not publicly available, is described as a work in progress, and carries no release timeline.

Google is rolling out Google Play alternative billing across the U.S., UK, and EU this June, letting Android developers route payments outside its system and avoid a portion of its fees. Australia, South Korea, and Japan will follow before the end of 2026. The rest of the world comes later, on September 30, 2027, Bloomberg Law reported in March.

Gemini in Chrome can now focus on exactly what a user points to, a chart, a comparison table, or a diagram, rather than processing an entire page and guessing what's relevant. Google updated its Gemini in Chrome support pages this week to document "Select from screen," a new desktop tool that lets users draw a bounding box around on-page content before submitting a prompt. The feature is reportedly rolling out now on supported desktop versions of Chrome to signed-in users who aren't browsing in...

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