Abner Li

One way you synced the very first Fitbit devices was by connecting a dock to your desktop computer and plugging in the tracker. The widespread availability of smartphones has replaced the need for that, and the old “Fitbit Connect” app is going away this year, along with local music sync.

In recent days, YouTube Music has more widely rolled out support for Android 12’s media recommendations feature that prominently surfaces recent albums and playlists to start immediate playback.

For Android 13, Google has redesigned how the Bedtime mode offered by Digital Wellbeing looks, while adding a rather useful “Dim the wallpaper” option.

Google Cloud’s Immersive Stream for XR makes possible interactive 3D and augmented reality experiences on mobile, and will soon support augmented and virtual headsets.

Around May, YouTube Music for Android and iOS redesigned “Listen again” as a fantastic compact grid and is now letting you find even more past songs, albums, artists, and playlists. 

Back in 2019, Google added a favicon to every mobile Search result and unsuccessfully tried to do the same a year later on desktop. Google is now testing a mobile Search tweak that uses large favicons and gives more prominence to site names.

ChromeOS 104 is rolling out starting today with several big interface updates that improve how you use the operating system.

In response to user criticism, Google Play is bringing back the list of app permissions, but another curious Store change sees version numbers removed from the App info section.

With Google Wallet, the company wants to replace the physical one in your pocket. One way it’s doing that is by highlighting how passes stored in Wallet can more proactively integrate with other Google apps in the future, but first you need to manually enable a Personalization setting.

For quite some time now, Assistant has supported IFTTT, but Google is now warning people about “upcoming changes” to the third-party integration. Some functionality is being removed and all users need to set up IFTTT again.

Google’s most recent design changes to Gboard introduced various Material You flourishes. A small update recently tweaked Gboard themes so they now extend to the navigation bar on more Android phones.

In most cases, Google rolls out the latest Android security patch to Pixel phones on the first Monday of every month. That did not occur this morning, and it looks like the August Pixel update has been delayed.

Out of the box, the Pixel Buds Pro is running older firmware but Google now says the day one update has “completed its rollout” and should be available if you didn’t see it initially.

Google is now more widely rolling out Gmail’s Material You redesign – first announced last month – on the web while also teasing that a tablet revamp is coming later this year.

Google is rolling out Android 13 Beta 4.1 to the Pixel 6a following the mid-ranger’s launch on Thursday.

With the Pixel 6a officially hitting store shelves and arriving for the first customers today, Google is releasing a day one update. 

At the start of last month, Google announced that Duo is becoming Meet and adding all of its features over the coming months. Google Duo’s Meet merger is now beginning to roll out on Android. 

Alongside the August 2022 Security Bulletin, Google today published the “Android 13 Security Release Notes,” and it suggests that the next major version of the mobile OS will launch in September.

To make Classroom even more of a centralized hub, Google is officially launching support for add-ons that bring in third-party education tools. 

In partnership with Google, iFixit last month started selling genuine Pixel phone parts. Google has now published a very detailed Pixel 6a repair manual that looks to be identical to what is used internally, but it’s only available in French.