Earlier this year, Google revamped the two primary ways people interact with the Home app. The company is now teasing a “next generation design of the Google Home App” and is looking for testers. 

Back in June, it emerged that Google wanted to exempt political campaign emails in the United States from Gmail’s spam filter. This spurred a lot of backlash, but the company is proceeding with the pilot program after receiving approval today from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). 

Google might be bringing back an old At a Glance capability on Pixel phones that shows “Commute” times.

Google today announced a series of updates on improving information quality and literacy in Search, starting with Featured Snippet callouts.

After being integrated across Android and the Chrome browser, Google Lens is now the main visual search experience on the desktop Google Images website.

As we spotted earlier this month, Google Meet is adding a “live sharing” feature that “allows all meeting participants to interact with the content that’s being shared,” including YouTube, Spotify, and a handful of games.

After launching for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Workspace client-side encryption (CSE) is coming to Google Meet.

Read Along wants to help improve child literacy by using Google’s speech recognition technology to give kids reading aloud verbal and visual feedback. Originally an Android app, Google’s Read Along is now on the web to better expand availability.

Pixel Launcher search is getting a big upgrade with Android 13, including the ability to query the Play Store. Meanwhile, ahead of the public launch, Google continues to survey users about the capability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

As of late, Google has been working to add more features to Chrome’s New Tab Page, and the latest example is Google Photos integration.