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.
One of our favorite Wear OS watches of the last two years was the TicWatch C2, featuring a clean, refined design at an affordable price point. This year, Mobvoi is upgrading that watch into the TicWatch C2+, bumping up to 1GB of RAM, which has become the norm for Wear OS.
Microsoft is shutting down Mixer, its competitor to Twitch and YouTube Gaming, while moving both their partners and their xCloud game streaming service to Facebook Gaming.
Leaning on the great success of the Galaxy A51, Samsung is launching two new colorways for the phone in the US, Prism Crush Blue and Prism Crush White.
Our coworkers over at 9to5Mac have enjoyed the availability of IP67 cases from Catalyst for Apple’s AirPods line. Now, Catalyst is launching a similar waterproof case for the second generation Google Pixel Buds.
Today is Father’s Day in many countries around the world, and to help you celebrate, Google is letting you craft the perfect macaroni art card to send to any and all of the dads in your life.
For some time now, we’ve been tracking Nearby Sharing as Android’s answer to AirDrop on iOS, allowing you to, as the name suggests, share things to devices that are nearby. Now we’re finding that Google’s ambitions for Nearby Sharing are far greater, with the feature getting close to arriving on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
On this day in 1865, slavery properly came to an end in the United States, and June 19th has since been celebrated as Juneteenth. Commemorating the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth, Google has replaced their homepage logo with a powerful music video narrated by LeVar Burton.
Since the launch of the original Pixelbook, Google has been pushing for the Assistant to play a larger role in Chrome OS. Their latest push will use an on-device version of the Google Assistant to handle “the most common queries” directly on your Chrome OS device.
During April’s Stadia Connect event, Google showed off Wave Break, an upcoming First on Stadia title that takes the familiar skateboarding genre and adds a heaping helping of Miami Vice. We took some time to chat with one of the developers of Wave Break, learning their ambitions for the game as well as what it’s like to develop for Google Stadia.
Last year at GDC 2019, Google unveiled Stadia to game developers with a strong focus on new features that would be nearly impossible on traditional gaming platforms but are made easy with cloud gaming. One of those features, “State Share,” will be arriving for Stadia in beta this summer in support of Crayta.
Without a doubt, the one game that more people have been hyped for, on Google Stadia and beyond, than any other this year is Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, the game’s developers have just announced a major delay to Cyberpunk 2077’s release date.
Update: CD Projekt Red has once again delayed the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Google has released a new Chrome extension, called Link to Text Fragment, that allows you to easily create and share a link to a particular portion of a page.
The next Stadia Connect event, where Google will share the latest features and games coming soon to Stadia, has now been set to take place next month.
Since shortly after its launch, Google’s Flutter SDK has been transitioning from a simple cross-platform framework for Android and iOS apps into an arm of Google’s “ambient computing” ambitions, with support for web, desktop, and more. Today, the Flutter team is showcasing their work-in-progress support for making apps on desktop platforms like Windows and Linux.
June is Pride Month in the US as well as other parts of the world, and Google is continuing its celebration of the tradition by bringing 16 new “Sounds of Pride” ringtones and notification sounds to their Pixel phones.
One of the more underrepresented genres on Google Stadia right now is RPG, with Final Fantasy XV being one of the few examples. Later this year, two games — Windbound and Cris Tales — representing two very different styles of RPG set to arrive on Google Stadia.
One of the better things about the old Android Auto, before it got redesigned, was its Google Feed-like home screen that offered useful things like your upcoming Google Calendar events. The latest version of Android Auto points to your car regaining its Google Calendar smarts, including navigation shortcuts.
For a few years now, the Google Assistant has been integrated into Android TV, with most newer remotes offering a dedicated Assistant button and some devices offering “Hey Google” support. Now it looks like Android TV is picking up Voice Match integration with the Google Assistant, according to the latest update to the Google Search app for Android TV.
In this week’s top stories: Google Stadia picks up official support for the OnePlus 5, 6, & 7 series, the Adobe Photoshop Camera app launches on Android, our Damien Wilde reviews the affordable Nokia 5.3 phone, and more.
Up to this point on Android, when any file is deleted, be it a photo you took or a song you downloaded, it’s immediately gone forever. With Android 11, Google has quietly introduced a new trash folder that can help keep your photos and more from being accidentally deleted.
In recent years, we’ve all wisely become more privacy-conscious, with more folks learning of and caring more about features like end-to-end encryption in messaging, but what about the sensitive files we keep on our phones? The Files by Google app is preparing the ability to create a pin-protected “Safe folder” on your phone.
Over the past few weeks, protesters around the world have spoken out against all forms of racism and to proudly declare that Black Lives Matter. Google has been a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests, and now the Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist.”
Update: Google’s Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words “blacklist” and “whitelist.”
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This afternoon, Sony took the wraps off their long-anticipated PlayStation 5, and in the process of doing so, they’ve shown what Google Stadia is missing most.
A web developer has spotted and shared an interesting trick that can remove many ads from sites like YouTube and bypass paywalls for publications.