Android

Increasing enterprise adoption of Android devices has been a long-running initiative for Google. The company is now offering its own mobile management service with Android Enterprise Essentials that’s catered towards small and medium-sized businesses. 

The latest beta version of Play services rolled out last evening to reveal that Google is working on a “Find My Device network” capability named “Spot” that leverages your Android phone to locate other devices. 

Back in November, Google announced that it would start testing end-to-end encryption in Messages for Android. After being limited to the beta channel, E2EE is now rolling out to all stable users.

Back in April, Google activated the Android Earthquake Alerts System in Greece and New Zealand. This Google Play services-powered mechanism is now live in seven more nations as the global launch gets underway.

Android’s open nature leads to some disparity with how apps and features can work across devices from different smartphone makers. Over the last couple of years, background app performance has been a point of attention for Google, and now, the company is asking the Android developer community to call out the worst offenders for killing background apps.

Yesterday, Apple showed off an extensive suite of new software features for iOS, macOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and more. Here’s a rundown of everything Apple showed at WWDC 2021 that was already possible with Google’s apps on Android and Chrome OS.

Last year, Google started showing a search engine “choice screen” to those setting up Android devices in Europe following an antitrust ruling. Google is now updating it to include more providers and make “participation free.”

After years of ignoring the fact that it was originally supposed to be a cross-platform standard, Apple finally announced an expansion of FaceTime to Android and Windows devices through a web app allowing users on other platforms to join iOS 15 users in their calls. To go with it, though, Apple picked a pretty ugly-looking and cheap Android phone to depict the functionality. It’s a tactic that’s sure to annoy a lot of Android fans, but the honest truth is this: it’s perfectly accurate.

Apple announced a whole slew of features for FaceTime today, but there was one major announcement for Android users: You’ll soon be able to join FaceTime calls via your phone’s web browser.

In a notable technology push, Walmart is giving 740,000 US employees a Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro that’s preloaded with a new internal app to help customers. This Android phone will also be available for personal usage.

Google Autofill is a fantastic time-saver and has developed to add even more layers of security when doing things like making purchases or accessing sensitive accounts online. Almost a year ago, the option was added to use biometric authentication to access password autofill, and now Google is adding the option to sync your autofill settings across all of your devices.

Android 12 will feature a slew of privacy features from a new Setting dashboard to the ability to disable app access to the camera and microphone. Another update later this year will make it so that users are better able to opt-out of personalized ads in Android applications.

It’s fairly well known that Google captures your location data almost constantly and, often, can directly pinpoint your location on both Android and iOS smartphones. According to some uncovered documents, Google once purposefully made it more difficult for Android users to stop this data gathering.

Last year, Google’s mobile browser introduced a custom share menu to replace the system default. Chrome for Android is now adding a built-in screenshot tool.

DeepMind is Alphabet’s AI research lab, and today, it unveiled AndroidEnv as a platform that allows reinforcement learning agents to “interact with a wide variety of apps and services commonly used by humans through a universal touchscreen interface.”

Over the past year, work-life separation has become increasingly difficult for people, and that’s likely to stay as hybrid work becomes the norm. Google conducted a study on this occurrence and found that most users want to separate work and personal life on their phones, with profiles serving as one possible solution.