Trending about Android

Google confirmed in January 2026 that the Pixel Take a Message bug had caused ambient audio from owners' surroundings to be transmitted to incoming callers on some Pixel 4 and 5 devices, with no dedicated alert that the microphone was active. The company responded by remotely disabling Take a Message and next-generation Call Screen on those devices, according to 9to5Google. Based on the research available, that is the only Pixel call failure Google has publicly confirmed.

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 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...

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:...

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.

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...

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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 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.

Samsung Galaxy Smart Glasses Leak: Specs, Price, and 2027 Roadmap

Retail packaging for the Samsung Galaxy A27 has surfaced through a Kenyan e-commerce retailer's Instagram post, showing the phone in three color finishes alongside a regional price and a printed 24-month warranty. The images are the most recent entry in a leak sequence that now spans official renders, marketing materials, and an accidental Samsung product page publication and together they describe a phone that's being meaningfully repositioned, not just refreshed.