News and Updates about Android

Multiple leaks point to higher prices on premium storage tiers, not a blanket increase. The $1,999 entry price may hold. The Flip 8 picture is murkier.

Global smartwatch shipments fell 2% year over year in Q1 2025, while Samsung's shipments dropped 18%, according to Counterpoint data reported by Android Central. That was not just a bad quarter for wearables. China's smartwatch market grew 37% in the same period, and Huawei and Xiaomi both posted shipment gains.

YouTube is testing a new video player layout on Android that removes text labels from every button beneath the video, repositions the like count away from the like button, and moves Save and Download into an overflow menu. The test has surfaced on a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and a OnePlus 15, both running app version 21.23.487, while other Android 16 devices on the same version kept the older layout, Android Authority reported yesterday. Reddit posts from a few weeks prior flagged the same...

Samsung appears to have briefly posted a full product page for the unannounced Galaxy A27 5G on its Czech Republic website before pulling it down. The listing, according to Los40, citing SamMobile, makes months of Galaxy A27 5G renders look far less speculative: It points to a cleaner design, a Snapdragon chip, four color options, six OS upgrades and six years of security updates, and one notable durability downgrade.

Google Health version 5.02 is rolling out, bringing back Hourly Activity, the hourly step-goal charts that disappeared when the app was redesigned. The Google Health 5.02 update also adds improved nap tracking and easier Key Metrics reordering on Android. It's the second meaningful release in under three weeks, and it delivers on a specific public commitment Google made in late May.

Google is moving WhatsApp backup controls out of WhatsApp's own menus and into Android's system settings. A Play services update rolling out today, v26.23, will let users manage WhatsApp chat backups in Android settings directly, placing those controls alongside the phone's other backup options rather than buried inside the app, Android Authority reported.

UC San Diego researchers are building a mini data center from 2,000 retired Pixel smartphones, stripped to their mainboards and clustered in groups of 20. According to a Google Research blog post cited by heise this week, each 20-board subsystem performs roughly on par with a conventional general-purpose server, and one such cluster already supports the simultaneous workloads of about 75 students running Jupyter Notebooks.

That small green dot in the top-right corner of your Samsung phone is a privacy indicator, not a bug. It means an app is using your camera, microphone, or both. If you also see a faint flicker near the top of the screen during calls, that is usually something else: the proximity sensor.

Google began rolling out Bubbles on June 16, 2026, giving Android 17 Pixel phone and foldable users a way to keep apps available as floating windows without leaving the app they're using.

Google began rolling out Android 17 to supported Pixel devices on June 16, 2026, and the update includes a dedicated gaming interface designed for foldable inner displays. The Android 17 foldable gaming mode is confirmed and built into the OS, but it is not user-accessible yet.

Google Home Nest forum posts disappearing with no archive plan

Chrome 150, expected around June 30, removes one of the last internal flags that allowed determined users to keep old Manifest V2 ad blockers alive in Chrome. Chrome 151, expected in July, removes the remaining cleanup code tied to the old extension platform.

Galaxy S24 S25 Battery Drain After April Update: What the Evidence Actually Shows

A Google employee confirmed this week that the company has been investigating a Google Pixel bootloop issue tied to its March, April, and May 2026 software updates, with devices freezing on the G logo or crashing immediately after PIN entry. The acknowledgement covers the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10 series, and the public issue tracker has accumulated close to 800 entries since March, according to heise. Google says updated guidance is now available.

Huawei reportedly unveiled HarmonyOS 7, a major upgrade to its self-developed mobile OS that the company is framing as its entry into what it calls the "agent era" positioning the platform less as a conventional Android rival than as an AI-agent system designed to coordinate complex tasks autonomously across devices. The announcement puts HarmonyOS 7 features directly in competition with Apple's iOS 27, according to South China Morning Post.

Waze is starting to show traffic light icons for some drivers, bringing the navigation app closer to Google Maps and Apple Maps on one basic road cue: knowing when a signalized intersection is ahead. The feature is now appearing for more users after months of testing, but it is not showing up for everyone yet, according to 9to5Google.

Google Home Instant Account Relinking: Why Devices Go Offline

Gemini for Google Home Update: Faster Responses and Privacy Tradeoffs

Best Buy Canada's product page for the Google Home Speaker lists June 25 as the release date, according to 9to5Google earlier this month. Google has not confirmed the date. It does not appear on the American Best Buy site or the Google Store. That single retailer listing is, as 9to5Google noted, the only specific date signal available for a product Google publicly announced in October 2025 with a Spring 2026 target and a $99.99 price.

Huawei has set a firm date. The company published an official notice today confirming it will raise prices on its "intelligent collaboration products" starting July 1, 2026, citing memory chip shortages, rising component costs, and AI-driven chip demand as pressures it can no longer absorb, according to Huawei Central. That notice covers smartphones, tablets, and other devices across Huawei's lineup, and moves the Huawei price hike July 2026 from executive speculation to a dated, company-issued...

Facer and Citizen launched Kick It today, a free World Cup watch face for Wear OS that surfaces live match scores, tournament standings, and news headlines directly on the watch face itself. No app-switching required. The catch is real, though: eligibility is locked to four countries and requires Wear OS 6 or later, which cuts out a substantial portion of the global soccer audience before they even check the download page.

Murena launched /e/OS 4.0 today with the company's most direct attempt yet to address the practical obstacle behind most failed attempts to leave Google: not finding a different phone, but untangling a decade of email, contacts, Drive files, and account relationships from Google's infrastructure. The release lowers that barrier. How much, and for whom, depends on what you need from your phone after the switch.

Google confirmed Wednesday that a Play Store bug causing crashes on Wear OS smartwatches has been fixed, but the Pixel Watch Play Store crash fix has only been confirmed for Pixel Watch devices. Galaxy Watch owners reported identical behavior and have received no equivalent confirmation from Google or Samsung.

OnePlus launched the Turbo 6X and Turbo 6X Pro in China this week, and the pricing structure between them is hard to ignore. At the entry tier, the OnePlus Turbo 6X and 6X Pro are separated by just CNY 100, roughly $15, with the Pro adding a larger battery, an AMOLED display, faster charging, and stronger water resistance for that gap, according to TechCabal. Both phones stay under CNY 2,400 ($354) across all configurations, with the base Turbo 6X starting at CNY 1,899 ($280).

Verizon's carrier documentation has done what Google has not: publicly identified which Pixel Watch models are in line for the Wear OS 7 update. The Pixel Watch 2, Pixel Watch 3, and Pixel Watch 4 all appear in Verizon's changelog entries. The original Pixel Watch does not, and given that Google's own support commitment for that device expired eight months ago, that omission strongly suggests the first-generation watch will miss the update entirely.

Google began notifying users this week that a new setting called Google Search Services History will govern how the company saves and uses the media submitted through Search. The change affects photos taken with Google Lens, recordings from the real-time Search Live tool, voice queries, spoken phrases entered into Translate, and uploaded files and video, The Verge reported Wednesday.

OnePlus is reportedly preparing to launch a new budget phone series in India, with some models priced under Rs 20,000 (roughly $240) and a target window of July 2026. The line is expected to carry the N series name and sit below the existing Nord range, which would give OnePlus a three-tier portfolio for the first time. OnePlus has not confirmed any of this.

Google is rolling out a Gemini for Home smart display update in Google Home version 4.18, adding visual hourly weather forecasts, natural-language media browsing, and conversational news to Nest Hub displays. The changes are rolling out to Early Access users and may not be available to everyone immediately. Performance improvements — making responses faster — are included in the same release.

Samsung has pushed an update to its Always On Display app that triggers animated goal celebrations and red card alerts directly on Galaxy phone lock screens, arriving two days before the 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage opens.

A new Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro battery leak suggests the rumored flagship could pack a 5,000mAh cell matching the Galaxy S26 Ultra's capacity in a noticeably smaller body. Tipster kro (@kro_itnyang) shared display and battery details via Digital Trends this week, adding to reports suggesting Samsung may expand its Galaxy S27 lineup from three models to four when it launches in early 2027.

Google is rolling out Gemini 3.5 Live Translate today across three surfaces at once: the Google Translate app globally on Android and iOS, Google Meet for enterprise customers entering private preview, and the Gemini Live API for developers in public preview, according to Google's announcement. The Meet piece carries the biggest numbers: Google says the feature now supports 70+ languages and more than 2,000 direct language combinations in a single call, up from four languages that routed...

Google announced at I/O last month that Search will automatically generate interactive visual tools, including diagrams, graphs, simulations, and custom interfaces, directly inside search results for all users, free of charge, later this summer. This is not a separate app or a paid feature. Search itself will assemble these outputs in response to ordinary queries, according to Google's I/O announcement.

Google cut the price of its AI Plus subscription from $7.99 to $4.99 per month this week and simultaneously doubled storage from 200 GB to 400 GB, 9to5Google reported. That's a 38% Google AI Plus price cut and a storage doubling landing together. The lower price takes effect at each subscriber's next billing renewal; the storage increase is already rolling out over the coming days.

Some Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 owners are reporting eSIM failures ranging from activation problems to severe lockouts, and Google is reportedly aware of the issue, but has not confirmed a fix timeline.

Samsung Messages is being discontinued in the US market in July 2026 for devices running Android 12 or later. Samsung has not confirmed whether the phase-out will apply outside the United States.

Apple is reportedly building a photo reframing tool for iOS 27 that would let users shift the apparent viewpoint of a spatial image after capture, not by filling in synthetic pixels around the edges, but by working with actual stereo depth data recorded at the moment of shooting. That's a materially different operation from anything Google Photos offers today, and it points to a category Google has not yet publicly addressed. If Apple confirms it at WWDC this month, Google's answer to the...