Kyle Bradshaw joined 9to5Google in 2018 with a special interest in Google’s Fuchsia OS, rooted in his experience of being the first to offer a visual preview of the revolutionary design of the in-development operating system. Since then, his attention has broadened to include the secrets hidden within other areas of Google’s public codebases.
By reading the public Fuchsia code, Kyle was able to prove the existence of the Nest Mini and the Nest Hub Max months ahead of their respective announcements. With evidence from Chromium, he reported on Google’s since-canceled efforts to create an offshoot of Android designed for “touchless” feature phones.
In 2018, Kyle reported on three distinct Made by Google Chromebooks in development, the Pixel Slate, the Pixelbook Go — a full year before its release — and “Meowth,” the original version of the Pixel Slate that was canceled due to Intel’s delays that year. For ChromeOS itself, Kyle was the first to demonstrate the upcoming light theme redesign in action.
Looking at the early evidence of the Pixel 5’s specs, Kyle accurately predicted in February 2020 that the Pixel 5 might not be a traditional “flagship” phone. In 2021, he reported that Google’s next headset would be the “Pixel Buds A.”
Kyle was the first to report that the Pixel 6 would mark the debut of Google’s in-house processors, later revealed to be the Tensor chips.
Kyle contributes to the APK Insight column at 9to5Google, discovering the hidden changes in Google’s apps. These efforts have revealed hotly anticipated features, details about upcoming devices, and unexpected connections between companies.
He can be reached for tips or just friendly chat by Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, or email. If you’re looking for his other works or side projects, head over to Kyle’s personal portfolio.
The aftermath of last week’s discovery of the potentially misleading claims that Google makes about how and when location information is sent back has continued billowing out. Today it’s been learned that a lawsuit has been filed against Google in response.
Android has almost always offered a way to backup your device, to keep your data safe in case anything should happen to it. Today, those backups are saved automatically to Google Drive, but in a future version, users will be able to save backups manually.
Features of the new Gmail have been rolling out to users since its unveiling just before I/O. One such feature, Confidential Mode, which offers a suite of email protection options, is arriving now on mobile. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is advising users to be fully aware of how Confidential Mode works, and how its use can affect others.
Firebase, Google’s cloud-powered app development platform, is receiving a major update including a fresh look and interesting new features for user interaction and crash management.
Yesterday, we reported that Google may be bringing Windows 10 support to multiple Chromebooks through a project called ‘Campfire’. However, new evidence has come to light this morning suggesting that the Pixelbook may be the only currently available Chromebook to join Windows around the campfire.
With the launch of Android 9 Pie on Monday also came the release of its source code. Inside that code is new documentation on an interesting feature that allows for the modification of basic Android UI. This system, called SystemUI Plugins, will help in the design process of future releases of Android.
Dart, the programming language powering Flutter, Google’s cross-platform app development kit, and one of the primary languages used in Fuchsia OS, has officially reached version 2.0.0.
With this morning’s official launch of Android Pie on Pixel devices, it was only a matter of time before AOSP followed suit. The official source code for the latest version of Android is now live for OEMs and developers to read or build themselves.
Many of you have seen the reports claiming Fuchsia will replace Android within the next 5 years and have shared understandable concerns about how Google can so swiftly replace such a core piece of their ecosystem. This week, we take a look at where Fuchsia might fit in and how Google could make it a smoother transition.
Expand
Expanding
Close
As part of the Android Jetpack announcement at I/O in May, Google unveiled a redesign for the Android Support Library, called AndroidX. Like its predecessor, AndroidX is designed to help developers maintain backward compatibility with old versions of Android. As announced on Reddit, these libraries are now open source, as part of AOSP.
Reports emerged yesterday about the future of Fuchsia OS, including a five-year plan to replace Android. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at one interesting aspect of the report that has sparked keen interest, specifically where Fuchsia will stand on user privacy.
YouTube Music, the latest in Google’s long history of attempts at breaking into the music streaming market, launched last month in 17 countries. However, it may be too late for Google’s latest attempt at music streaming, as the competition is fierce between veteran services like Spotify and Pandora, newcomers like Deezer and Tidal, and of course Apple Music from Google’s biggest competitor. Since launch, we’ve been using YouTube Music extensively to see how it truly fares against some of these rivals.
We’ve been very closely following the development of Google’s Fuchsia OS with the publicly available information in both the source code and code review. While this is often all we need to take a guess at how Fuchsia is progressing, we almost never see what happens behind closed doors at Google. A new report offers insight on Google’s plans for the open source OS, including upcoming devices and ambitions to replace Android.
We all know Google is in the business of analytics, whether it’s as a service to help web developers or to help improve the relevance of ads you’re shown. Android developers even have the option of putting Google Analytics into their apps to better understand their users actions and decisions.
It comes as no surprise to me that Google’s Fuchsia Team has decided to build analytics directly into the operating system.
Google is actively developing a YouTube app for its fledgling Fuchsia operating system, according to evidence we found in its source code. On a proposed change related to a Tic-Tac-Toe demo game being created for Fuchsia, Googler Larry Landry posted a link that appears to be for code from a private, in-development “YouTube Player”.
This week in Fuchsia Friday, we take a look at how Fuchsia will appeal to web developers and an interesting look at Fuchsia possibly being used outside Google.
This morning, some users have been reporting — and we’ve witnessed first-hand — a combination of issues with antivirus programs leading to not being able to access Google sites, including Gmail.
Open source is a very important principle at Google, considering how many of its projects are developed that way. Google is now a Platinum sponsor of The Linux Foundation — a non-profit organization that advances the cause.
Last time on Fuchsia Friday, we dug into two prototype devices that Google is developing to run on Fuchsia, and mentioned that there’s a third “device” in the works. Today we’ll take a look at Machina, Fuchsia’s built-in emulator.
Google App Engine is used by developers to make it easier than ever to deploy web apps without the fuss of managing a server or scaling infrastructure. Today, Google announced that App Engine is gaining support for the wildly popular Node.js JavaScript run-time.
Sometime in late May, Fuchsia, Google’s in-development OS for mobile (and more), added a loose connection to AOSP in the form of new ‘projects’ in their Gerrit source code management hub, but now the code is being used and we can see what it’s actually for.
In a progressive move, Google has released a new open-source privacy library to allow developers to encrypt Android push notifications.
As part of a bigger move towards third-part interoperability in G Suite, Google has entered into a partnership with Norwegian companies Pexip and Videxio to introduce interoperability between Hangouts Meet and a variety of video conferencing services.
According to a report from Windows Central, the Xbox One will be receiving an update to gain support for Google Assistant and Alexa, in addition to its existing Cortana support.