Since 2018, YouTube has offered a collection of free-to-watch movies that are supported by advertising. That YouTube library in the US is now expanding to TV shows with almost 4,000 free episodes.

After the death of Play Music, Google Play was left with applications, books, and television. The Play Store will soon drop Movies & TV on Android with the Google TV app being the new place to buy and rent content.

After updating the primary tab with interactive device toggles inspired by Android 11, the Google Home app wants to redesign the “Feed” to be more useful.

Under the auspice of spring cleaning, Google Photos is redesigning its Library and Sharing tabs over the coming weeks. There’s a focus on easier sorting of albums and shared content, as well as the introduction of various shortcuts.

As classic Hangouts is set to go away for Workspace customers, Google continues to update Chat and Spaces with more capabilities. A small tweak sees Gmail for Android introduce new status bar icons that help differentiate notifications from Google Chat and Spaces.

Google Maps is partially down this morning with the outage particularly impacting its website and APIs for third-party applications that use Google’s location services.

Chrome on desktop has long offered the nifty ability to directly search other sites from the address bar. Google is making a pair of changes to Chrome Site search, including how you have to manually “activate” these shortcuts.

Last year, Google announced that app ratings in the Play Store will be specific to each device type. The company is now continuing that work of improving the large screen experience by surfacing high-quality apps and warning about unoptimized ones .

Google wants to leverage AI to help kids get a more “personal learning experience.” In the coming months, Google Classroom is getting a “practice sets” feature that surfaces assistance and other suggestions as students do the work.

At this point, Google’s biggest Android apps have been updated with Material You. Redesigns are widely rolled out, but widget availability varies depending on whether you have a Pixel or Samsung device running Android 12. The following is our running tally of which Google app Material You widgets are available where.

As previewed in February, Google Docs on the web is getting a rather nifty template for drafting emails that features Gmail integration. This is part of Google’s @-menu and Smart Canvas push.

I want to use a tablet. In that fantasy, I’d use a large screen to quickly go through tweets, email, news, and other torrents of information during more laid back periods of the day (breakfast, lunch, etc). With the launch of Android 12L and the impending launch of updates and/or new devices, I tried to live that dream. The entire time I was conscious of Google’s track record, but I was not ready for its first-party apps to disappoint me as much as it did.

The majority of Google’s apps today feature a bottom bar and Contacts for Android is now the latest to add it as part of a redesign that retains a modified navigation drawer.

Following new widgets for YouTube Music and Google Photos in December, Digital Wellbeing will soon get a screen time widget that shows how much you’ve been on your phone and the top Android apps being used.

Google has informed Android developers that Play Store users in Russia have lost the ability to purchase apps, games, IAPs, and subscriptions.

Following Gmail at the start of this year, Google Drive is the latest iOS app to get new work-focused widgets, while there are also updates for Translate and Chat on iOS in the coming weeks.

The Chromium underpinnings of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have seen more in-the-wild “zero day” bugs as of late. Google today explained what’s behind that browser trend, as well as what security features Chrome has in place to counter it.

Nearby Sharing, Google’s answer to AirDrop, is gaining the ability to send files and more to more than one Android or Chrome OS device at the same time.

Google TV was a big redesign that replaced the Play Movies & TV app on Android, and it’s now adding a “Highlights” tab that serves as “personalized feed of entertainment news” and getting some Material You flourishes.

In recent weeks, Google has been testing and slowly rolling out a number of new features for Messages on Android. The company announced today that iMessage reactions, Google Photos integration, and several other capabilities will soon widely launch.

The latest project from Area 120, Google’s house incubator, is called “Aloud,” and it lets YouTube creators “quickly and easily dub their videos into multiple languages.”