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This week’s top stories: EMUI 9.1, RCS in Google Messages, Chrome OS ‘Release Notes,’ more

Kyle Bradshaw | Jun 29 2019 - 8:00 am PT

In this week’s top stories: Huawei begins rolling out EMUI 9.1 to their phones, RCS arrives in Google Messages for UK and France residents, Chrome OS unveils its upcoming “Release Notes” app, and more.

EMUI 9.1 release

Despite various ongoing political (and shipping) issues that could cause Huawei devices to stop receiving updates in the coming months, in the near term, Huawei’s updates are keeping a steady pace. This week has seen the beginnings of the release of the latest EMUI 9.1 update to a swath of Huawei phones. The company confirmed that a total of 49 different devices are planned to receive EMUI 9.1 between now and August.

First up is the Mate 20 line which is getting the update in June — which doesn’t give Huawei much time to push the OTA. Closely followed in July with the P20 and P20 Pro getting the update alongside the Mate 10 and Mate 9 series. The final handset to get EMUI 9.1 will be the P10 series in August — tablets notwithstanding.

Google Messages RCS

Earlier this month, Google announced that it would be taking over the responsibility of ensuring RCS messaging is rolled out to devices, starting with Pixel phones in the UK and France. Our conveniently placed authors, Damien Wilde and Dylan Roussel, representing the UK and France respectively, were both able to confirm on Friday that Google’s RCS takeover has arrived for both countries via the Google Messages app.

If you like using the browser client on your desktop, you’ll be pleased to hear that this too works with RCS. You can send images, GIFs, video and audio from your desktop, plus it has all the typing notifications and more on top. You’re also able to send apk files, should you want to share them via RCS/SMS, but note that these are only visible on mobile.

Chrome OS ‘Release Notes’

Every time Chrome OS gets an update, it usually takes dedicated individuals to figure out what all has actually changed and share it. Our Abner Li did just that earlier this week when Chrome OS 75 released. In the near future, though, Google will actually provide their own information on Chrome OS updates through a new “Release Notes” web app, which we got a sneak peek at.

When the app becomes properly available, rather than sharing everything new in each Chrome OS update, it will instead tailor the release notes to your specific device. This, for example, should mean that Chrome OS devices that cannot support Linux apps won’t see update notes related to Linux apps support.

Send photos via Duo

Google Duo got a new hidden feature this week, with the release of version 56 to the Play Store. It’s now possible to send an image directly to a Duo contact, and even edit it before you send. These shared images, being only available to view for 24 hours, let Google Duo take on a similar role to that of Snapchat.

At the moment, images cannot be browsed and sent directly from inside Duo. This is likely coming in a future update to the app. The ability to message photos makes Google’s only successful consumer social app quite full-featured, and impossibly close to a chat client if text capabilities were added. The ability to add captions achieves this in part.