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.
Back in January, we took a precursory look at the in-development, cross-platform Xi code editor that then-Googler Raph Levien was building and how it related to Google’s Fuchsia OS. Levien has since left his position at Google and gave an update yesterday on how that will affect Xi’s development going forward.
The state of Google’s media services is currently a bit of a mess. The lines between Google Play Music and YouTube are blurred in somewhat confusing ways. This has caused double-billing issues for some, which Google has now addressed in a new support guide.
In the build-up to October 9th’s Made by Google event, there’s been just a little bit of hype around the Google Pixel Slate, Google’s first ever Chrome OS tablet. A Chromium commit seems to indicate that Chrome OS may not be the only operating system available for the Google Pixel Slate.
A team of Googlers quietly uncovered an ambitious new concept for mobile web design, called ‘Portals’, that promises to make Chrome for Android feel snappy and immersive. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at this potential future technology built for the mobile web.
It’s been less than a year since the release of Google’s Pixelbook, yet all signs point to us seeing the next generation of the Pixelbook line later this year. If this is the case, we believe the most likely candidate to be a Made by Google device (of the many we’ve seen so far) is a Chromebook currently codenamed “Nocturne“. Here’s what we think we know about this upcoming device.
With the launch of Linux app support on Chrome OS, a new era of Android development has now emerged on Chromebooks. This also includes Flutter, Google’s cross-platform app development framework which has recently left Beta with its 1.0 release. Here’s a quick guide to installing Flutter on Chrome OS.
In its second and final Release Preview before 1.0, Flutter, Google’s cross-platform app development framework, has added and updated dozens of iOS-themed widgets, for ‘pixel-perfect’ iOS app experiences.
Android development has long only been possible on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers. That changed with the release of Chrome OS 69 and Linux app support. Here’s how you can start developing Android apps from Android Studio on Chrome OS.
When Google Code, Google’s free hosting for open source projects, began shutting down in 2015, the developer community was reasonably upset. Google seems to have taken some of that criticism to heart with the launch of the Cloud Source Repositories beta, while adding powerful new features for enterprise customers.
Google has long been at work trying to get their Chromium web browser up and running on their upcoming, work-in-progress Fuchsia operating system. We now get to see the first fruits of that effort, with a hands-on look at Chromium for Fuchsia.
Early last year, it was announced that Google had acquired Fabric mobile developer tools, to complement the Firebase app development framework they had acquired in 2014. At that time, there was no action required by developers to continue using the service. Today, Fabric has released an official migration guide and roadmap including a shutdown estimate.
Over the past several days, we’ve put the spotlight on two devices, ‘Atlas‘ and ‘Nocturne‘, both of which we have many reasons to believe could be unveiled next month as part of the next generation of Made by Google Chromebooks. However, there’s a third story to be told — one of ‘Meowth’, the Google device that the company might have been forced to scrap.
A report in February said that Google was quietly working on a video game streaming service, codenamed Yeti, to rival PlayStation Now and Nvidia GeForce Now. Now, a mention of Yeti popped up this afternoon in an interesting place — the public Chromium source.
Chrome OS is gaining better native support for SMB file sharing, one of the most common Windows file server protocols.
Google has announced the general availability of its new Google Photos Library API, designed to help developers create new experiences for (or at least help organize) our Google Photos libraries.
Brydge, maker of high-end keyboards for tablets like the iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro, appears to be making a Chromebook keyboard with a unique feature not found on their current offerings.
Things have been relatively quiet in the Fuchsia scene as of late, but development work has not ceased. Today on Fuchsia Friday, we take another look at Fuchsia’s device prototypes as found in its source code, including a brand new one.
As (increasingly frequent) data leaks have proven, encryption is hard, and good encryption can be even harder. Today, Google has announced the first major release of Tink, an open-source, cross-platform library designed to make secure encryption easier for developers to use correctly.
Thanks to a recent commit, found by Chrome Unboxed, we learn that Chrome OS is getting a new UI for setting up fingerprint authentication, bringing it in line with Android.
Version 1.11 of the Go programming language was released over the weekend, just in time for GopherCon 2018, where Google announced the release of draft designs to be potentially implemented in ‘Go 2.’
Today, Google has announced that it is granting $9M in Google Cloud credit to further the development of the Kubernetes container orchestration system.
Early this morning, the President of the United States tweeted of his discontent toward Google’s search results, claiming a bias toward left-wing media. In his tweets, the President claims that searching for the phrase “Trump news” primarily returns results from “National Left-Wing Media” with Republican and conservative publications being “shut out.”
Google Cloud Platform is launching a new hardware-based offering to complement its Cloud Key Management Service with new standards compliant key generation methods to help customers with their most sensitive information.
Anyone with a TV can tell you there’s a lot of bad news in the world today, and with the volume of bad news, it’s hard to parse the good. Google Assistant is now doing something to help combat the negativity, by introducing a new feature.