 Hello everybody. All right, there we are. Hello everybody. Oh, no, I'm not logged in. Join the chat. Connect. What's up, dolls? What's in the happenings? What's in the house? I cannot believe this is the, no, no, it's not, this is the second to last Tuesday of April. No, don't say that. April flew by. Geez. You all fly by. It's crazy. They all fly down, fly by down here. I got a bill, I got a bill, I have a bill due on May 1st and I got the email reminder and I was like, is that the end of the month? Oh, it is the end of the month. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. Time is just a weird, weird thing. It's a weird thing, isn't it? Yeah. Class circles. So I created a, so for, for, for people that aren't hosts, I, I don't know time zones. I logged on about an hour ago, panicked that I played for the show and I was like, I'm going to be a few minutes late. I'm here. Wait. And I noticed no one was on the stream and I was like, fuck, when is the show? And, and I, I'm in Maryland. So I, I just thought for sure the show was at seven and so I was freaking out. And so that was pretty funny. I'm not going to lie. I laughed when, when I, when I saw it, like I checked as I was like getting the kids, getting the kids into the bath and into PJs. I'm like, let me just check discord to make sure everything's going. And I saw that whole exchange and I just went. So, so yeah. But then, so what happened was I just didn't play on my day very well. And it snuck up on me probably because I, I gave myself one less hour. So I was in the middle of a workout. I did 70% of it and I was going to come to the show all sweaty. And then I put like makeup on and then I realized what time it was. After all that, I went to bat to go do the make to, to go finish the workout. And then of course all the makeup kind of went like that. And I go up to my sister who I'm staying with. And I, I said, I looked like, and I mixed up metaphors. And I said, yeah, I probably look like a, look like a raccoon punched me. And then my brother and all my sister started laughing at me. And I was like, yeah, I look like a raccoon punched me. That's not a thing people say. Because I think I was mixing up like raccoon eyes and getting punched in the face because I had like these big electrical. So anyway, now apparently a raccoon punched me is now my thing. Oh well. Is your, is your lighting different winner? Are you, you're just, you're just in a different location. Yeah, I'm in a different state. Okay, okay. And so having no idea what time it was. But yeah, where you are right now, which is not your normal setup, totally has a studio vibe to it in the background. Yeah, I do have lights. So this is, this is like a sound proofing wall from Uplift, the Uplift desk. So it's like a, it's like a felt, assembleable wall. Oh, and I do have a nice like DSLR and I do have two lights. Like I have a hair light and I have several lights. So yeah, it's cool. You brought all that with you or did you already have it in this location? Oh, I have, I have an office here because I come visit my family all the time. So I, Oh, I see. I had many boxes sent to my sister and brother-in-law's house. They're very, very nice. You just kind of keep it all set up. Yeah, I used to live here. So I have a ton of stuff. So they just give me a room. So it's very nice. It is very nice. Yeah, it's like when I lived in San Francisco and I would come back to New York and stay with my sister all the time. And I basically had my own room in her house for a while, much to her, much to her, my brother-in-law's chagrin. But I hope it's not to their chagrin. Well, I mean, we'll slightly more contentious relationship than I think that it sounds like what your relationship with your sister. Oh, yeah, we're pretty, we're pretty close, but yeah. So they did put me on the far side of the house so that they wouldn't have to hear me. And to be clear, me and my sister are close as well. It's just that we like to get at each other's nerves. Quick reminder to everyone watching live here in the audience, you can help us pick a title for the show at af.showbot.tv. And on Twitch, there's a neat little Twitch trick that can do it. I'm sure Willie in the chat will post, or someone will post how to do it. But yeah, please do that end of the show. We'll pick a show title. We are going to be a minor programming note. We're going to be quite on the ball tonight because Jason has to get to a family birthday celebration. So it is my younger daughter's 11 year old birthday. And right now she's at a Girl Scout thing. So I'm not really like missing out on much, but she'll be home in a little bit. And that'll allow me to kind of spend some time with her before her bedtime, eat dinner and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's happening. They grow up so fast, don't they? They grow up so fast. Let me tell you, Michelle, that's crazy. You blink and it's a yeah. Well, my niece turned three yesterday. So now I'm going to remember that that your daughter is one day after my niece. She turned three yesterday? She's a three-nager. She definitely is a little sassier than last time I saw her. And that was only a couple months ago. Oh, gosh. It's really funny because she'll like wine and give her her mom lip. But then because I'm the visiting auntie, she'd be like, no, I don't want to. I love you. Good night. I was like, so, oh, wow, this is such an easy job. Just come here. And I don't have to do any of the hard stuff. Yes. Very nice. All right. Should we do this? Let's do it. Let's do it. We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. I feel like I need to like, like wake up a little bit. Oh, after I kind of finished prepping the rundown and everything, it was like an hour left to the show. And I was like, man, do I take a nap right now? I feel okay. Oh, you can't do that. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. Oh, really? Well, if I keep it, if I like set a timer for like 15 minutes, it would be restorative for me. But if I went like 45 minutes, it would be, no, it would be bad. Anyways. Okay. Well then, do you want to run the top? Because it looks like I put myself as doing the, the blogging blog. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, I can do it. Yep. I can do it. No problem. You turn, you turn loops, you turn the music loop off, right? Yeah, I did. Cool. All right. All right. Cool. Let's do it. So say goodbye to win. Say goodbye to Michelle. I stopped my cam, but you can still hear me, right, Jason? Yep. Can still hear you. All right. I'm going to cover you up. Always listening. I'm just kidding. All right. Cover you up. Meet myself and start the show. Wisp's going. Have a good show, my friends. Oh, and welcome to Android Faithful, your weekly source for the latest news, hardware and apps for the world of Android. I am Jason Howell. No, can't hear you. You're muted. I am, I am Ron Richards and I cannot match that energy there, Jason. And I went to it now and I also cannot match it, but I'm stunned. I don't think there's ever any doubt whether I can match that energy. I'm Michelle Ramar. Oh, come on. I expected you to be busting out right now, Michelle. That's what I expected. Welcome to Android Faithful, the land of the androids. What a time to be alive in the land of the androids, is it? Oh, yeah. We're in that lovely doldrum spring period. Is it doldrums? I think it's a little doldrum. There's nothing. I mean, doldrums-y right now. I know. I know. This is where Michelle corrects me and says that he's got a lot of work working on the Android 15 stuff. But this is the time of year to do spring cleaning. This is the time I spring clean my Android 15 backlog. Yeah, there it is. Later in the show. You've just been creating a list, creating a list. I'll get to it someday and now. Yes. I literally do have a list of Android 15 content that I want to write. All right. Well, I'm sure you do. Now's the perfect time to launch a new podcast if somebody was going to do it. Yeah, but I don't know why anyone would do that. Yes, Ron is alluding to the fact that I launched a new podcast, actually a new podcast and a new kind of redesign for the YouTube channel. But you mentioned the podcast, TechSploters, the name of it. Episode Zero is out there. Do a search in your podcatcher of choice. TechSploters is also the name of the YouTube channel. Basically, it was Yellow Gold Studios before. Now it is TechSploters. At a certain point, I was like, Yellow Gold Studios doesn't really say anything about what I'm doing. It's close to my heart, but it doesn't really have any sort of clue work. It's a good production company name. Yeah. It's like the network, but it doesn't have to be the identity of what I'm doing. TechSploters, as you know, Ron, because I think I hit you up on a WhatsApp literally within minutes after it came to me on a walk with my dogs. It came to me. I was like, I love this name. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but holy cow, I'm setting it aside. No one had the domain. No one had the YouTube channel name. I was amazed at that and I finally found a use for it. It's all about the human side of tech. I've got some really cool plans coming up and episode one of the podcast May 3rd with a guest, the first guest being someone we are all very familiar with. I'm sure some people listening would be able to guess, but I'm not going to confirm or deny until it happens. So that's it. TechSploters podcast and TechSploters. Well, congratulations. It was a great launch. Thank you. Yes. Encourage everybody to go to the YouTube channel or socials and check out the video. Awesome launch video. I'm sure I'm speaking for Michelle and Wynn and myself when we're all honored to be a part of it for one word. But yeah, definitely everybody. If you're listening, go find it. Go check it out and go subscribe to TechSploters because it's going to be the best new tech podcast of the year. Thanks, man. I think it's going to be fun. Yeah, looking forward to it. What about this show though, Ron? This is the best new show of last year, but it's still the best Android show of this year. And just a quick reminder to everybody, head over to patreon.com slash android faithful. That's how you can support the show. We've got a lot of cool stuff planned and in the hopper and cooking and it's all because of everyone who supported us on Patreon. And so if you are listening and you're not supporting us on Patreon, please go to patreon.com slash android faithful. Check out the different membership levels, see what options are there for you. You can get an ad free version of the podcast. You can get a t-shirt, you get stickers, you get access to our discord. You get to vote on a new story for us to talk about, which we're going to do later on in the show. So please, again, this is like a PBS member drive time period or whatever. Go to patreon.com slash android faithful. We would love to see that community grow. So if you're on the fence about it, please pull the trigger. We would appreciate it. So yeah, it helps us do what we do. Indeed. Now more than ever. All right. Well, why don't we get started? All right. Let's do it. It's time for the news and when you've got the top story this week. What you got? Yeah. And it's the big one. And of course it's a story about AI or at least AI is at the heart of it. So huge news out of Google today in that they are very, they're doing very deep and very wide restructuring. And it looks like Android is going to be part and at the heart of that big restructuring for AI. So Google has announced some very significant restructuring to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence across multiple platforms and products and services. And so basically the Android and hardware teams are combining into a single Voltron Zordon. No, not Zordon Zordon, you know, that kind of Gundam type figurine. And basically the idea is that this new team, which we call to platforms and devices will be led by Rick Osterlo, friend of the show Hiroshi Lockheimer, will continue to be at Google but working on other products. And the idea is that, you know, as Ron likes to say, Google is infamous for right hand not talking to left hand. And sometimes at big companies that could be because right hands got like an iron glove with like one little hole for left hand to talk to. So the idea is that they can actually, you know, maybe put the two hands in the same gloves that they can have an easier time talking. This metaphor has just gone out of control. That's got to be a big glove. Big glove. But basically in order for them to really integrate AI successfully efficiently, they need to have people in the same place. They need to have total control over, you know, stacks, the whole full stack, or, you know, the verticals, if you're more business speaking. And so they're going to do this across many different teams, like their AI teams, like DeepMind and DeepMind and the other AI team are combined together. And so now, yeah, Pixel, Android, Chrome, Chrome OS are all going to be under a singular team platforms and devices led by Rick Osterlo, friend of the show. Sorry, Samir Samat is going to become, quote, present of the Android ecosystem. Also friend of the show. I mean friend of the extension of the show. Friend of the extension of the show. Couple of times. Yeah, sorry, I meant to say yes. Also friend of the show, Samir Samat. So yeah, it, I don't know, what do you guys think? Is this a good thing? Is this a long time coming? Is there anything you're nervous about? All of the above? Yes. Yeah, I think yes across the board, right? Yes, across the board, yeah. All of those things you just said just because for me, I think the two biggest headline, the two biggest, at least things for me from it were just the general idea of restructuring three things. The general restructuring under the AI banner, which is like, you know, drinking game to the max, right? Like we're just like so in on the AI Kool-Aid. But then secondarily, having it all be under Rick Osterlo, who we are very fond of, think is great, all stuff like that from a device and hardware standpoint, not necessarily from a software, you know, and not to say that he's not, you know, is an incompetent executive manager. Like that's clearly what he's doing, but coming mainly from a hardware kind of, you know, kind of background. But then the third thing, which is like, buy Hiroshi? I know, that's kind of the bittersweet part. Wait a minute, Hiroshi, where are you going? Yeah, like all we've seen is Hiroshi will be, will be seeking new projects. And like, and I read the Verge article coverage of it where I guess whoever wrote it for the Verge was on a Google Meet call with Rick and Hiroshi from Hiroshi's office, like, you know, showing off that like they're, you know, they've been, they even said, we've been asking Sundar to do this for two years now and like all this sort of stuff. So like, if Hiroshi is mentally checked out and ready to move on, I wish him the best of luck. But you know, we got a little soft spot in our heart for Hiroshi, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I think, as you mentioned, we like Sundar's blog post did explicitly say that he's going to be, I think, overseeing the transition. Yeah, he's not just like, not involved anymore. And then seeking, seeking new projects, which is basically like, go to do other stuff. Yeah, so. Yeah, I think he's actually, what was it, corporates, he's kind of taking charge of like the Japanese division as well, or spokesperson for the Japanese division, but. Japanese AI vision is something like that. Japan is AI? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think it was interesting to note in the Verge article that, I don't know, if you have your chin full of hats, some people were speculating, if you're speculating that there's some kind of power struggle or something, Verge was like, very quick to say that they were, that both Rick and Hiroshi were like, no, no, that's not what's going on. It's not like, you know, some kind of game of throwing thing, it's just part of the restructuring. And I think something that is interesting that was my concern is that, you know, obviously, this makes a lot of sense because Pixel has always been like the test bed, and obviously the kind of like exemplar of, you know, Google AI features, but that Android is still an ecosystem with tons of OEMs. And so there's like a tension there where we get it, like a whole walled garden ecosystem works for some people, but that there's a lot of gain in the Android ecosystem by having like a broad swath of OEMs, but you do lose that integration and this kind of like tight, you know, tactical integration, also like personnel integration and company and your team integration. And like part of that, I think they were going into the history of Pixel and like Android itself kind of being a little bit separated because that's the intention, right? Androids should be Android and Pixel is like Android shouldn't serve Pixel first, I guess is a feeling. And so I think that was a concern that came up. And I don't know, I think Virg bought it up to Rick. And, you know, I mean, I guess we'll see how it actually, you know, turns out, I mean, Rick gave kind of like, I think not to be unfair to Rick or anything, a diplomatic answer in that case, but that's kind of my concern is that, you know, is Android continue going to be, it's going to continue to be a platform for a lot of people and not just, you know, little too pixel focused, because it feels like that sometimes Pixel drops, right? Like, why can't the rest of everyone, other than Samsung get the nice things? Is this just going to kind of make that even harder, you know, to overcome is like the pixelification of everything? Or in the other direction, or in the other direction, is it going to be de-pixelizing it because Rick is so such a great relationship with the OEMs and the other companies and like wants to go more broad, like we just literally don't know. Samsung and Google are collaborating. So here's having a very long time. Yeah, Michelle. So here's basically the overall change that I see happening is like for years, you had deep mind, I think Google brain as basically in separate companies entirely within Google, basically entirely different teams working on their own projects, doing so much research. And if you recall, like, one of the seminal research papers that led to the foundation of like the large language models and the chat GPT that we have today was done by researchers at Google. And for a long time, they're basically just siloed doing their own research, basically like a research scientist, like a like, like a lab at a university doing research on purpose, right? It was on purpose. It was like that on purpose. But now we're starting to see the commercialization of their research of their features into Google. And we're seeing that use more and more across Google products. And we see kind of what happens when there's a silo between this research team and the work they're doing and the rest of the company, like we talked about recently how the pixel eight launched with eight gigabytes of RAM, and that was barely on the threshold of acceptable amount of memory for Google to launch Gemini and Ano on and I led to them not launching it at all initially until backlash happened. And then they were kind of they fell back and said, okay, we'll allow it, but you have to enable it, you know, in developer options. Well, you know, if they had worked more closely from the beginning saying, hey, we think you might want to plan your flagship devices to have at least a minimum 12 gigs of RAM in the future, then you know, we could have probably avoided this situation. So like, having these teams work together is, I think, great for expanding the commercial use of a lot of the Google AI research that we're seeing from their deep mind and the Google brain divisions. And also, I see it as a great opportunity for the Android ecosystem because we're already seeing this play out where Google is releasing Gemini Nano, their Gemini models, and then there are companies that are building features using Gemini as their back end. For example, last week, we talked about or was it last week, OnePlus slash OPPO, they're getting new features that are using Gemini in the back end. And, you know, there's a concern, of course, with Google, you know, putting Android and all the hardware even closer together under one division that there won't be separation anymore. And then like only Android only pixel will get the latest features. But we're already seeing that that's not the case because they're already opening up a lot of the stuff that used to be pixel exclusive, like pixel used to have all the best machine learning features and only pixel look at those features. But now we're seeing so many of these AI features and other devices that are straight up powered by Google's models that used to not be the case in the past. Well, time will tell. We'll see. But I think collectively for all of us, we want to wish our good friend, Hiroshi, goodbye. So take it easy, Hiroshi. I know he has a lot. You do have the jibber jabber Hiroshi. Not really. I'm faking it. I've got a open mouth and a closed mouth JPEG, and I'm just bouncing between the two. That works. That works. But for our audio listeners, you got to go watch the video because we have our old Hiroshi talking head from the old Twitter days. I didn't know you had that. I was frantically searching for one Burke sent it to me last November while we were talking about this. Not only do you have it, that's sharp. That's like source quality. Now, I do want to note that I did not play taps while we were just showing Hiroshi because he's still with the company. Yeah. Like he is an immensely talented executive who has been nothing but kind to us the few times we had the opportunity to talk to him and interview him. He's been an excellent steward of Android in his time in his position. I feel like I will miss him in that position. At the same time, having had some really wonderful conversations with Samir Samat, who I feel like is kind of like taking his place, I'm excited for Samir. I think this is a great opportunity for him to kind of take the reins a little bit and be a little bit more forward facing. And when it comes to interfacing with media and a lot of that other stuff that Hiroshi was doing real quick before we move on, anyone else getting a little bit of like Google plus vibes? Remember however many years ago when Google like the hot thing was the social networks and Google had Google plus and the directive inside was like, all right, let's steer every ship towards this. You've got to integrate it or else. And it's kind of a similar situation. I don't know if it necessarily will have the same outcome. But the thing is that I don't blame them for that. And I don't blame them for this is that when you're running a company as large as Google, you have to take bets. It's all about taking bets. And what are you going to bet on? And at that time, Google plus was the right bet and it didn't pan out. And then you adjust to move on. Right now AI is the bet. So I don't blame them. So I'm just a little bit worried is that I think traditionally the Android team has been known and infamous at Google for being siloed and isolated. But in that they're going to do their own thing and they're going to do what's best for Android. And that was something that Chet wrote about in his book. And there was like some article last year about how someone basically on the way out of Google, sorry, poop talk to everything. But with the exception of Android, because they they're very fierce and defending their way of, you know, working. And I'm not saying it's going to go away, but I worry about that. And corporate melding, yada, yada, everybody's okay, ours becomes everybody else's problems. Anyway, I'm just corporate. Anyway, sorry, didn't mean to go down that right. But I mean, it's it's a concern. But we'll see. We've got to be positive. And yeah, we'll see the leadership is great. So we'll see what happens. Good luck to them. All right, with that, it's Android 15 time with Michelle Raman. That's right, Jason. And as usual, I want to news the cover. And I'll try to do my best to succinctly cover them. So let's start with, I think I'll stream my screen here. That's okay. So the first piece of news that I want to talk about is a new feature that Google is working on potentially called even dimmer. So the article title that I use is Android 15 may make it even easier to use your phone while in bed. I know a lot of you, you know, you know, it's bad for yourself. You shouldn't be using your phone while in bed, but you do anyways. And I know I do it too. And you can use a blue light filter and adaptive brightness. But the thing is with adaptive brightness, a lot of times it doesn't go low enough in brightness to actually be usable in bed. In those situations, you can use this feature if you're watching the video screen here called extra dim under accessibility options. The thing about extra dim is though you have to manually enable it when you need to use it and then manually disable it when you need to, you know, turn it off. And that can be annoying. I pulled users on social media and a lot of people seem to forget to turn it off in the morning. And the problem is when you din the display and you need to use it out in the sunlight, that's problematic because then you can't, you can barely see anything. This new even dimmer feature from what I seem to have uncovered will allow the device to go even dimmer than usual, which I know sounds a lot like the extra dim feature. But what I think this even dimmer feature will do and I don't have a screenshot of it, unfortunately, is basically it'll expand the effective range of the adaptive brightness feature. So right now the adaptive brightness feature has like a set minimum brightness and a set maximum brightness. But when you enable even dimmer, the lower bound of the adaptive brightness feature will be able to go even lower than before. And this will be useful because then you can use your phone at night. And the adaptive brightness will go even lower than it previously than it currently can. But then when you're using your phone throughout the day, like regular, it'll still adaptively adjust the brightness based on the ambient lighting. So basically, this is going to be a version of extra dim that you don't have to remember to turn on and off. It'll just be automatically adapting itself to the brightness. So when it's really dark, really in your dark room, it'll automatically go really dim your display. And then when it's, you know, regular brightness throughout the day, it'll just get as bright as it needs. And the next feature is a change that might come in handy if you have a lot of notifications to deal with. So for those of you familiar notification channels is a feature that groups notifications by categories. Right now, a lot of apps create a ton of notification channels. So if you're watching the video feed, it's I've kind of zoomed out on this screenshot a lot. But on the right, you can see these are all of Instagram notification channels that are 25 in total. Hold on. This zoom out is like insane. I had to zoom out all that much, otherwise you would not be able to see all the notifications. So for audio listeners, it is a screenshot of, you know, on off switch that goes, I mean, 25 rows of switches, right? There are 25 switches, 25 notification channels that Instagram creates. However, only three of those have ever been actually used. Instagram has only ever sent notifications through three of those channels. And so if you're going through settings and trying to figure out which channels should I disable or enable, it's kind of hard because there's so many that just aren't being used. So this change that I spotted in Android 15, which I'll stress again is not enabled by default yet, will automatically hide any unused notification channels and settings. And to enable them, you have to tap on this new menu icon and click show used unused channels. And this basically just cleans up the clutter in the app settings. In Instagram's defense, the notification API is very difficult and it's traditionally been like once you set up notification channels, you cannot delete them ever for like compatibility reasons. So a lot of times what happens is when you try to refactor something, you cannot get rid of people's old notification channels. So it's kind of like a damned if you do damned if you don't like, you know, to me. And so I this is terrible and I actually have a lot of problems with the Instagram app, but sometimes you can't help it. So I'm glad that the uncluttering can be can happen at a higher level so that we can do whatever we need to do. And then someone else will clean up the mess. So anyway, just wanted to say that may not be their fault. It kind of is, but not 100%. I mean, it's not not intentional. It's not intentional, but it can be very difficult to clean up notifications like for future versions. Like if you make one mistake and how you organize it at the beginning and your feature set changes and you want different notification channels, you're kind of screwed to be honest. And you have to just work with what you got. So anyway, just wanted to say that it's not like Instagram. I don't know. I'm going to say that nice about Instagram. It's not Instagram intended for this, but sometimes it happens. Not usually this bad, but anyway. Okay. And the next one is a new API called a storage lifetime API that will allow the Android operating system to tell you how long your phone storage ship will last. So we're getting phones that are getting longer and longer support policies such as the Pixel 8 and Galaxy S24 with seven years of updates. Well, you want to know if your hardware will actually last that long. So what Google is working on is a new API that will basically measure the remaining lifetime of your storage ship as a percentage. And this API will be available, will be used by a new device diagnostics app that will tell you, you know, the percentage of your devices remaining storage lifetime. Some devices like Pixel devices can report the remaining storage lifetime at 1% granularity. In other words, they can report, you know, you have 99% remaining lifetime or 98%, whereas others will report at a less accurate 10% granularity. So like 90% or 80%, you know, only in increments of 10%. Not every device will support this new API. This is something that Android already internally collects. But in Android 15, Google is preparing to expose this value to users through the new device diagnosis app. And as I mentioned, I was all the other things that I talked about. This is not available yet in beta one. However, I did actually share a method to find this information on Android police, this article right here. It's actually quite easy to find out like here, I have an example in the screenshot for audio listeners of my Pixel 6a showing 99% lifetime remaining of my storage ship because I barely use that phone as a test device. This device diagnosis app also lets you test your display, touch, touch screen as well as see some information about your battery health. The next piece of information I wanted to share is a update to screen sharing. Google is looking to implement built-in screen sharing protection features in Android 15. I don't have the exact details on what this will do, but it looks like these new screen sharing protections will apply some kind of mechanisms to protect sensitive app and notification content from being inadvertently shared when you're screen sharing or screen recording. And from what I know, there'll be a new API that apps using UI toolkits like Jetpack Compose and other APIs can use so that possibly they can block specific fields from ending up in screen recordings or screen shares. And there's also another flag that suggests that notifications can be blocked entirely during screen shares. Now, for those of you who are keen observers, if you have a Pixel phone, you know that Android 14 QPR2 introduced a new app screen sharing feature that you share a single app screen. This is basically just expanding on that by limiting further what kind of content can even show up in a single app screen recording, or if you have to do a full screen recording, whether or not notifications appear at all because, you know, you can accidentally get a really sensitive notification while you're doing a sensitive screen recording. And the last major feature I wanted to talk about is a enhancement, basically the closing of a loophole in a security feature that Google introduced in Android 13. So in Android 13, Google introduced a feature wherein if you side load an app that requests a highly sensitive accessibility or notification listener service access, users would not be able to easily grant those permissions to those apps. And the purpose of this is to basically prevent users from accidentally side loading malicious apps that take total control over your device and listen to all your notifications and send inputs on your behalf. However, the mechanism they used to detect whether or not you're side loading an app from an app store or not was kind of flawed. Basically, any app could pretend they were an app store and use the same APIs that app stores use to side load apps. Well, Google is looking to close this loophole in Android 15 with a new enhanced confirmation mode feature that at the system build level has an allow list of installers and packages that are exempt from these restrictions. So this will be a much more clamped down version of that security feature that was introduced in Android 13. And to be honest, it's kind of difficult to explain this in full detail. I wrote a 1100 word article in Android authority that goes in depth. So if you're interested in this security feature, I highly recommend you go check that out. And lastly, if you are thinking about getting into the Android 15 beta now is a good time. I warned last week you shouldn't do it because NFC was broken. Well, lo and behold, Google pushed an update that fixes NFC. So now you don't have to go without Google wallet or contact us payments just by just if you want to get on the beta. And yeah, if you're wondering why NFC was broken, it's because Google tried to migrate the platforms NFC stack to a new project mainline module. And in the process, they kind of messed that up. And I mean, it's not like they did something significantly wrong. It's just there was just an error in the way they migrated. They're human to mistakes happen. The big switch. So I actually got an update today. So I'll try NFC payments next time I get a chance to cool. I thought you were going to say last week I warned you not to do it and you did it anyway, which was probably true for someone out there. So it's important to note that we are less than a month out of Google IO. Oh, so I got to imagine there's going to be a lot of Android 15 talk coming out of that. And as the beta rolls on, we'll start looking at the timelines of when this rolls out and start taking bets. Is it before or after Labor Day? And all the fun stuff that's going to happen with the new version. So yeah, a lot of exciting stuff coming up going to Google IO. We got that to look forward to. Very cool. Very, very nice. All right. Well, meta. So what the heck is meta up to these days? It turns out a lot of it has to do with AI, yes, but also VR, meta is opening up its horizon OS before this kind of naming it was just called Quest. But this is the operating system running Android, actually, because the Quest devices are running Android, if you didn't know, that powers the Quest VR hardware. Mark Zuckerberg says this is going to encourage more purpose specific devices by third party. So for example, there's a there's a couple of partners as Seuss with the Republic of Gamers brand doing a headset specific to gaming Lenovo doing a general purpose productivity headset Xbox and meta partnering up to do a bundled like gaming version of a headset with a bundled Xbox controller and Xbox cloud gaming and Game Pass. So the idea would be that through these third party partnerships, creating very specific hardware, right? Like it could be a headset that is specific to fitness that you don't want to have a headset when you're doing a fitness, you know, using it for fitness. So maybe this is a headset that's specific to fitness that's meant to be lightweight and meant to be perfect and ideal in the fitness environment. Hopefully it's washable. That's always how I feel too about the VR headsets and then fitness like, okay, wait a minute, you're sweating a lot that, you know, you better that band better be washable and then you better be washing it like it might be washable and you still just don't because it's just wearing it, but other than that, that's a great idea though. Sorry, I just I think it's so funny is that a suit like even when we were when I was prepping for the show and I saw the story coming up, I'm like, oh, meta and whatever. But like, like in the in the world of VR and stuff like that, like all the talk about Apple Vision Pro has gone off a cliff, right? Like nobody cares anymore, like they came out and like whatever. And meanwhile, I have not one but two friends in the normal world, who's all kids have a quest VR headset and like, that's what they primarily play. Like that then like my kid, I asked my buddy, what video games does this kid play? He says all he plays is Gorilla Tag on his on his quest VR headset. So I it feels like meta is actually succeeding in this place because they've committed. Well, yeah, they will. And they bought the they bought the IP from Oculus at the right time and then put all their resources into it. And then they renamed their company after the metaverse is to kind of like lean into whether that was a good idea or not. There you go, like Google Plus, right? Yeah, Google. Yeah. So the thing about like this whole announcement is I can hear. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. So the whole thing about this announcement is, you know, Zuckerberg and meta, they've been really big on, you know, the metaverse as a platform as much as I hate that term. And like promoting, you know, virtual reality XR and etc. You know, apps and software. But the thing is, so far, they've been the only one building successful XR hardware, you know, apart from Apple, which is an entirely own closed ecosystem. So what meta is doing these years, they're positioning themselves to become the Android of XR. And which is weird, I know to say, because Horizon OS is itself based on Android. But the thing is, they and Google don't see eye to eye, they couldn't come to an agreement. So Google is about to release its own Android of XR, aka Android XR OS heavily rumored to be announced next month at Google IO. But ahead of that, meta is preempting them and announcing its own, you know, open Android ecosystem for other hardware partners to fork. Because right now, you know, Qualcomm earlier this year, I think at CES, they announced the Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen 2, their latest, you know, chipset for XR headsets. But the thing is, if all these other companies were to try to build products based on that chipset, they would all be using Qualcomm's reference platform, all the software that's available. But a lot of what they'd be missing is all the stuff that meta has been taking, spent billions and years building, which is a software ecosystem. So all those other headsets would basically be doomed dead on arrival because they just would not have the years of experience and all that work that meta has done to fork Android and improve it and also build all these applications and all these things that already exist on their ecosystem. So they're basically licensing their operating system, which is what Google's model was all this time. And they're getting ahead of Google doing this on the Android XR side. And it's going to be interesting to see, you know, next month when we have two competing, but both based on Android versions of this XR ecosystem. To be honest, I'm a little doubting whether or not Google's is going to have as much success just because meta has so many years ahead of Google when it comes to XR. To a certain degree, they've proven themselves at this point, too. Like they've delivered on many of them. They committed and I got to say, though, I mean, Michelle, that whole story that you just laid out sounds a whole lot like competition to me. And that's good for consumers and good for the marketplace. You know, you don't want just one player dominating and doing all that, like we want to have options. And that's how innovation gets driven. And, you know, who knows what can happen down the road. So it's interesting for what's that. This is good for Apple having this fragmentation in the Android XR space. Like the best position that Google and Meta could have to compete against Apple will be working together. But if that's not going to happen, Apple is the one who benefits that hugely from this. Well, I mean, I don't, yeah, they might, but it's not like they're blown, you know, blown the doors. I just saw an article the other day on Gizmodo that was about how nobody cares about the Vision Plus anymore. How much is it again? Like $2,000? $3,500. Okay, then, yeah. It is a Gen 1. It is a development kit. Although they don't market it as a developer product. Yeah. I mean, it basically is a developer kit, a consumer facing developer kit. And we've all heard the rumors that Gen 4 of the Apple Vision Pro will be the one, like you got to go four generations before the price comes down and all that sort of stuff. But like at this point, does Apple have the time to catch up to Meta? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I don't think they're doing a yearly iteration cycle. And honestly, I love what Meta and Ray Bands are doing with those glasses. And I'm so tempted to get a pair, right? Because it just seems really, really cool. Yeah. I mean, I was kind of a little bit like, I was paying attention to the article, but I was kind of like, yeah, yeah, but the whole third party thing, and especially if I could get like ASUS, like as big ASUS gaming, you know, of the big ASUS gaming family, like, yeah, that is compelling. You know what I mean? Like, so I actually kind of perked up like, oh, okay, that makes sense. I might actually stop perking when I hear Meta and VR and pay attention. And actually, I don't know, I just like, I like that idea a lot. It's really interesting. Interesting to me that Michelle, you called this the Meta doing for VR and XR, you know, what Google did with Android for smartphones and stuff. And it actually makes a lot of sense when you put it that way, because Meta is not only doing that with VR and XR, like they just, you know, release their, their open source AI, the Meta.ai. And they're opening that as well. So they're kind of doing the Android for AI as well, bringing this like incredibly powerful AI platform to everyone for free, allowing everyone to build on top of it, whereas others are being very closed off on, on how they're doing that stuff. So, so in a, in a strange way, Meta is really, their, their strategy right now seems to be pre-open, which is just weird to say about a company like Meta that historically has not been. Yeah. But fascinating. It seems to be their focus right now. And I love that. I think it was great. Yeah. So, yeah. Cool. All right. Moving on. Moving on. I think so. So I want to thank again our supporting folks over at Patreon.com slash Android faithful, because every week you all get to vote on a new story for us to discuss here on the show. And also last week I asked you to send in some bug droid artwork. And boy, did you folks deliver? Oh, really? Including this, including this gem by Raven Simonette from the Bahamas, who lives in the Bahamas and said wanted to, and does a lot of diving and stuff like that. So wanted a bug droid reading the news underwater in a scuba with a Bahamas flag or close to a Bahamas flag. And this is possibly one of the best ones we've received as of yet. So the bar has been raised. If you're listening to the audio show, please go to our Instagram or social. I posted this on Monday. That's how good this graphic was of a bug droid underwater created by reading a tablet that I hope is waterproof underwater to get all the latest Android news. It's lit up. I mean, it's lighting the bug droid. But IP is it? Yeah. What is the IPV rating? That's what I want to know. It's still working at least at the point of this photo. Yeah. Raven, this is awesome. This is beautiful. And it's fun. And thank you. That was due, my goodness. Raven wins. So yeah. So the news stories that patrons could vote on over at patreon.com slash Android faithful this week coming in last was the one I was hoping was going to win. The fact that the electric vehicle car maker Polestar's upcoming smartphone looks surprisingly good because for some reason Polestar is making an Android phone. That got 19% of the vote coming in second at 27% of the vote was the pixel tablet will let you look and sign to assistant. And then finally, the winner, which we're going to discuss right now is the fact that YouTube's new AI features actually really helpful. And there it is drink again, we're talking about AI, Google AI, it's all in the mix. And now YouTube is getting its own AI injection into the Android app in the form of an ask button. So if you're watching a video and you see this ask button, you can click on it and you could type questions in about the video. And AI will answer the question will answer your questions as opposed to just watching the video. This is only available to YouTube premium subscribers in the US via the Android app. And yes, you can ask it to summarize the video so you don't need to watch it. And this will be available. It's only available until May 1 publicly. So it's a little bit of a test that they're doing with it. And I do find the, I mean, we know that Google is plugging AI into as much as they can. And I didn't use this on the YouTube side, but I laugh at the Gmail integration, because all my Gmail, all my email and Gmail now has a little summarize this email button, which I could just read the email, right? But if it's a long email, you can read the email. Yeah, but what was the last time you got a long enough email, you need to be summarized. And this like summarized the video, just watch the video. Well, I mean, yes, I mean, and I should probably not say it out loud because apparently I'm basing my career on video on YouTube. But I mean, sometimes you've got to wait like, you know, if this is like, here's all the steps to do this thing. And it's a 10 minute video like, okay, I got to click, I can click that button and get a good idea of what the summary is pretty fast. You know, what I wonder what I'm curious about is, does that button existing on a page and mind you, they're testing this, I don't think it's it's permanent yet. I think it's actually goes away at the end of the month and they'll probably be brought back for good at some point. But you know, in their tests, what are they finding about their ability to serve ads on YouTube content when someone goes to it and summarizes instead of watching? Does that actually impact their bottom line? I imagine to a large, you know, on a broad scale, it would I have to imagine. So then like, you know, how are they getting around that? Also, I wonder, I'm not an expert by any means in the YouTube algorithm, I know it changes, but I feel like watch minutes like also affect it as well. So 100% we know that that is a key indicator. Yeah, like impressions and stuff like that. So what is this going to do to that? It's like. Yeah. And you know, I'm also realizing the answer to my question, you know, what does this do to ads? Nothing, because you only have this feature if you're a premium subscriber. So it doesn't influence anything as far as that's concerned anyways. But it will it will mess with view stats, you know, how long does someone stay on a video before clicking away? All of these stats that I've now learned you can track with great granularity through the studio app. So yeah, that's interesting. So I have it. I just did it live now. I was watching bloopers of between two ferns with Zach Galifianakis. I was I saw something funny and I showed my wife it. And I just and I was like just right now. So I just typed in I'm like, who was the third person in the video? Right? Oh boy, no, I'm sorry. But the video doesn't mention anything about a third person being present. So your mileage may vary. I think I thought I turned it on, but I don't have it showing up. I mean, you know, summarize the video like it's going to it's just going to repurpose the description for me. No, no, no, no, it's not. It's not because they're it totally did this video features bloopers from between two ferns hosted by Zach Galifianakis. Okay, well, that's that's a poor I mean, I mean, this is an entertainment video. I mean, like versus an informational video or, you know, or or got from a bit of podcast, right? Like you can say, you know, you know, ask some more detailed questions and things like that. But I don't know, I feel like you're going to spend more time trying to get the AI to give you the answer you're looking for when you could just watch the video and get the answer you're looking for. I mean, I'll be completely helpful for like long seminars or lectures, things like that where there's like so much information and like a really huge transcript. Yeah, you could otherwise have to like, it'd be a hassle to look at. Yeah, possibly. I mean, this also goes part and parcel with my complaint about the changes to search in that the number of times I search Google for a specific like how to fix the lint trap on my dryer or whatever it is. And the fact that you get it, you're getting videos of how to repair a dryer in response versus like I'm looking for text, I need to answer quickly. And even the fact that they've injected videos into the questions as answers. So you get those four rows of questions and then you expand it and you get a video, it drives me crazy, right? Like I don't want a video. I want the like, what happened to WikiHow, right? Like what is the like, I'm looking for, I'm looking for the text answer to a technical question. Like what size screw goes in whatever, you know, but like it just it, it frustrates me. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know, it's neat. I'm going to play with it as much as I can before May 1st and see how it feels. But all right. But before we move on to hardware, we do have to thank our patrons because you guys are fantastic. Everyone who signs up on patreon.com slash Andrew Faithful gets a shout out on the show. And this week we're thanking Jeremiah Borkowski, Andrew Hitchcock, Per Eric Eck from Sweden, international, there it is. Eric DiStefano. And I hope I don't mispronounce this Ryu Manastas. And Ryu likes everything we post on Patreon. I love, I always see Ryu's like, like your post, like your post. Nice. So thank you everybody for your support. And you too can get your name, shout it out on the show by signing up at patreon.com slash Andrew Faithful. Yeah. We love reading names. That means there's a lot of you out there. So many. We're trying to catch up. We're trying to get everybody. I know we're now at five per episode. That's amazing. Wonderful problem to have. Thank you. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. All right. We've got hardware, some pretty interesting stuff coming up. All right. Starting with you, Michelle, because you got in your hands something that I would love to have in my ears. That's weird. That's right, Jason. That was weird. Well, it's not in my hands yet, but it is right now. I have the Nothing Ear A earbud. And you got the yellow ones, which I'm jealous of. Yellow ones. Yes. You posted a teaser with the white ear ones. They're like, I have the yellow ones. I think they sent the yellow ones to every reviewer out there. That's so cool. Let me switch my camera over. So Nothing announced this on Thursday, the Nothing Ear A and the Nothing Ear. It's the third generation. The other one is the third generation ear buds. I don't have those. I only have the more affordable ear A. These retail for $99. And I think, like actually looking at the spec differences between this and the ear three or just the ear, I guess. Yeah. I think this is the more interesting of the two products. First of all, this comes in, as you can see, a bright yellow color versus the other one only comes in, I think, white and black. I think that's significantly better design than just a plain old white and black ear bud. I think these look great. They sound great. The battery life is great. They feel great. There's so many things that these $99 ear buds do great that a lot of other earbuds in this price range fail at that. I just think these are a really great option if you're looking for great affordable earbuds that work well with Android phones in particular. So I've paired it to a Nothing Phone 2 that I have right here. And let me just show you the design a little bit of these earbuds. So you can see in the case, the case is transparent, which is nothing signature. You can see right through and the ear buds. It's quite big, actually. This earbud is the earbud cases, but it is kind of late because it's all plastic-y. And you can see it kind of opens and snaps shut pretty quickly. Let me open it up and then they pair to my Nothing Phone 2 right there. Take a closer look at the ear buds. You can see it as a plastic all over the design and these little silicone ear tips. I don't know if you like these kind of design. I don't know what they call this kind of design, like the one that stick out. Personally, they're pretty comfortable for me. I haven't had any issues with comfort or long-time use or anything like that. But I guess if I had one complaint about the ear buds, it's that in order to change actually control the ear buds, you have to kind of pinch right here to do anything. That's been very inconsistent for me. Pinching has just not worked. Is it a button? Or is it a capacity? No, you got to pinch. Yeah. It's the same thing on the ear sticks that I have. And Michelle, it takes some getting used to. Now I'm a pro-pincher. Pro-pincher. Yeah. Once you figure out the pressure and the points and stuff like that, then it goes pretty quickly. But yeah, it does take a second to ramp up to how to use them. I have to be honest. I also have both the ear sticks and the ear ones. And I never got used to it. I kind of just use my phone to control it. But I also just kind of gave up on getting used to them. So I didn't like it myself. The cool thing about these earbuds, they're $99, but they also support actor noise cancellation. They have three noise cancellation modes. You know, they have the regular disabled noise cancellation and transparency. They do this kind of weird thing where they like kind of like whisper in your ear like, what do you change in modes? And it's so weird. I'm like, please stop doing that. It's like ASMR. It's like ASMR. But no, I don't want to hear this. They start eating noodles in your ear. They support a lot of features, surprisingly, despite being $99, like all these, oh no, the night mode is turned on. So it's turned the screen orange. So you can see here that you have double pinch, triple pinch, pinch and hold commands, double pinch and hold. And one of the features they recently introduced with the Nothing OS 2.5.5 update is the ability to have chat GPT as your assistant. So you can long press on your earbuds stem. You know, I can't really show it here that well. Actually, I probably, I might be able to do it. Let's see. Do a live demo. Those never go wrong, right? Yeah, everything works in a live demo. Oh, there we go. It's locking chat GPT. It worked. So you can see, like, you can launch chat GPT instead of the default Gemini slash Google Assistant if you set that pinch and hold command in the Nothing X app, which is what I'm using to control the device. You can also do, you know, your usual control, single pinch, play, pause, change tracks, change volume, et cetera. You can also enable base enhance, which is enabled by fault. I actually have found that the base is a bit heavy to my liking in the default. So after this is over, I'll probably turn this off because I like more neutral sounding, you know, sound audio coming from my device. But if you, whatever, for whatever reason, don't like the default tuning besides base enhance, you can also go to the equalizer and then Nothing X app and change a lot of settings here. It's custom. You can even kind of, you know, you don't have a 10 band traditional equalizer because nothing has their own, this like three circular view, but you can play around with that. There's also a couple other features, standard in-ear detection, when you take it out of your ears, it stops playing music. You also have a low latency mode, a high quality audio mode that streams using the LDAC codec, which drains more battery life. By default, it supports the SBC and the AAC codec. You also have Find My Earbuds, which plays audio. And also these earbuds support Google FastPair and other Google related features. So it's really easy to connect your earbuds to your device and disconnect them and reconnect them to another device. Like I haven't had any trouble switching between my Nothing phone to my smartwatch and my TV whenever I want to use these earbuds on all my different devices. So yeah, I'd say these earbuds for $99, they are definitely worth the price, especially with the standout design. Earbuds are a commodity item these days. You can find so many different earbuds at every different price point. You really need something to stand out. And I think the earbuds, the Nothing standout feature is the design. And just everything else, it does right, generally. Like I said, I'm not that big of a fan of the pinch controls, but everything else is done really well. And just the design itself is a selling point of these earbuds. The yellow and black design has a real Sony Walkman late 90s vibe. You know, nothing's probably going for a more modern look, but there is a little retro aspect to that yellow and black kind of combo. I was thinking more Kill Bill that matches her like Bruce Lee. It's a generational thing. This is totally Walkman to me, but yes, I see Kill Bill too. And Bumblebee from Transformers. Yes. So just a quick summary, like what are you missing if you get the ear A versus the ear three? So like nothing has a table that lists some of the differences in the features. And the only features you're really missing by not paying $50 more is you're not getting the LHDC 5.0 codec, which is kind of rarely used anyways. You're not getting advanced equalizer and profile sharing or the personal sound profile feature. You still get ANC. As I mentioned, you get up to 99 hours without ANC battery life. You still get 10 fast charging with 10 minutes for 10 hours. If you plug it in with the USB C cable, you don't get wireless charging, which is one of the, you know, the bigger missing features. But you also do get IP 54 water resistance for the earbuds and IPX2 resistance for the case. And I'll say that IP 54 rating did come in handy because the other day I did drop my right earbud in the sink when there was water in it and I panicked, but I saved it. I rescued it using the old tossing it in a zip lock bag with rice and then use a hairdryer with like at cool settings. And it's, I rescued it. It works just fine. Excellent. Very cool. Didn't have another oopsie this time. Nice. Well, I still continue to like nothing. I like what nothing does. I hope there's another ear stick version because I don't like the, as everyone knows, I don't like the in ear ones. I love my ear stick. I'm on my second pair of the OG ear stick because my old ones were out of warranty and weren't charging. The case wasn't charging anymore. So I'm like, I'll just buy another pair because they're low cost enough. Like 99 bucks is a great price. So yeah, totally. And I'm yellow. Yeah. Like you said, Michelle, these, these earbuds, they are, they are total commodity at this point. And they have a, they have a total shelf life too, right? Like a little battery in there, depending on how long you use these things, you will reach a point to where either the battery is just so poor, it's, it doesn't, you know, last very long or the thing stops working altogether for whatever reason. And you're just going to have to replace it. And like, I don't, I'm not saying that about these particular earbuds, but my experience with other true wireless earbuds is, you know, you get two to three years out of them, and then you got to replace them. You just, you know, they don't last forever. Yeah. They're just total commodities at this point. So you need something that makes them stand out. And the design, certainly one of the points that makes it stand out. Yeah. Cool. Very interesting. All right. So what else is going on? Jason, what's going on? The one plus one plus pad two is apparently coming and don't have a whole lot of information on this, you know, from this rumor, which is basically all we have right now, according to Max Jamboer, Hamboer, Hamon. Sorry, Max. Sorry, Max. I can't be the only one to have said that, or maybe I am, who knows? But I apologize. One plus pad two, stepping up the processor power over the first one. The first one had the MediaTek Dimensity 9000. This one, according to Max, is going to have the Snapdragon eight gen three. And Michelle, you have the original, I never experienced the, did I? Oh, I think I did the one plus pad. I don't know. Maybe they're all blending together. I don't remember. I think you did. Did I have it? You did have it. And we were talking about Ron Amadio's like terrible review. And then you came on and we're like, Oh, that's right. Okay. Sorry. I had to remind myself that seemed like ages ago. That was just a little more than a year ago. Look, folks, a year and a whole show. Okay. Yeah. What's happened in the last year? That's right. I did have the one plus pad. You still have yours, Michelle? Yeah. Yeah. How has it stood the test of time over time? How has it stood up? I mean, it's an Android tablet. So I don't use it for like serious work, unfortunately, because Android just still isn't there compared to Windows. But it's nice. It's a media consumption device like it has surprisingly a lot going for it considering its price. You also get, I think you can get it bundled or does it come with a device, the keyboard and the stylus, I think those come separate. That's right. They're pretty affordable. Like you can get all the tablet, the keyboard and the stylus for pretty cheap compared to other devices. And considering it runs the oxygen OS with all the tablet enhancements that they've added, I don't think they have the full open canvas feature that they debuted on the one plus open, unfortunately, but it's a really capable tablet for its price. Yeah. The year of the tablet 2024, man. Tell me when plus is getting involved. Google's committed. Year of the tablet. It's finally going to happen. All right. So, Wynn, how about what's going on Huawei? What's going on with Huawei is that Huawei is celebrating the 12th anniversary of their P-Series with the Pura, sorry, Pura, Pura, Pura. It sounds like a cat food. Pura. Pura? Pura. I read it as Pura, Pura. Yeah. Like when I'm in Costa Rica, everybody says Pura vida, you know. Pura is what seems to be Pura, but Pura, well it's called Pura 70 Family, which is, and the P-Series is known for being photoscentric. And they're really interesting, really pretty phones. They do distinguish themselves with a triangular camera bump. It seems that basically the best way to tell phones apart these days is the shape of their bumps. And this one is triangular with a three lens unit. And of course this is the series of phone, these three phones, the Pure 70, 70 Pro and 70 Pro Plus are all using the sometimes according to who you ask. Oh, I'm like, oh, sorry. I'll explain what happened in just a second. Depending on who you ask, the slightly contentious Kirin 9010 chipset made by Huawei. So the Huawei Pure 70 is the baseline model. It's a 6.6 inch, 120 Hertz LTPO OLED display with a 2760 by 1256 res. It's got the 50 megapixel main camera, 13 megapixel ultra wide and a 12 megapixel 5x telephoto 4900 milliamp battery with 66 watt wire charging 50 watt wireless charging and starts at about, I call it 5500 UN about 760 USD for a 12 gigabyte of RAM, 256 gigabyte of storage version. So yes, and comes in very, very shiny color ways. Now the 70 Pro and 70 Pro Plus are really similar and not too far off from the specs of the baseline model. It's a 6.8 inch screen on both of these as opposed to the 6.6 on the baseline model. Same Hertz, a slightly bigger resolution at 2844 by 1260 resolution and a very similar camera units with a 50 megapixel main, 12.5 megapixel ultra wide, but a 48 megapixel three and a half telephoto, slightly bigger battery as kind of like a slightly bigger phone might imply with 50 with a 5050 milliamp battery, 100 watt wire charging and 80 watt wireless charging. And how they differentiate is kind of a few more features. The Pro itself has Paul gigabytes of RAM with 256 gigabytes of storage for 6,500 UN, which is about $900. The Pro Plus has 16 gigabytes of RAM and satellite messaging. So that's pretty interesting as kind of a distinguishing super plus super pro plus feature. And it comes with 512 gigabytes of storage. No word yet on whether this is going to be available outside of China. I mean, we probably certainly will not be getting our hands on them on this show, but they are really beautiful phones. And, you know, obviously it'll be interesting to see, especially with this new chipset made by Huawei, how, you know, performance and how like the consumers like these phones, but they're really attractive. And we'll have to see how the photos that come out of this photocentric line shape up. So there you go. I like that purple colorway. And I got to admit the cameras unit and even the detailing on the back of the phone look really cool. And the dramatic photography of the phone and the person in the left of the phone. I was going to say it's very matrix. Yeah, very matrix. Yeah, it is. You know, I'm kind of interested in trying it out considering, you know, I actually have the Huawei P60 Pro right here. I was actually using it as a webcam for my hands on like, I got this device last year just because I really like the camera. And I'm kind of curious to see how the P70 compares for a 70. I guess they call it now. Pura. Pura. Pura. Okay. Pura. That kind of makes sense. Well, cool. We'll talk about cameras. Michelle, you might want to check out the upcoming Techno Camon 30 premiere because that is all about the camera. We've been talking with Techno. Techno has been on the edges of what we've been talking about for the past year. So when you and I are both very, very curious about this company, they have a ton of market share in Africa. But this phone is actually going to be available globally starting May 2024. It was first shown at Mobile War Congress in February and it's the premiere of their own imaging system. It's got 4K 30 30 FPS full scene AI noise reduction HDR video capability capability, which is a ton to say. And it's got great light and color in your video, even in low light situations. They've got four 50 megapixel sensors and three X optimal optical zooms. Optical optical zoom. I can't say that. But you know, it's an interesting looking phone. It's 6.77 inches. It's being powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 8200 ultimate 5G chip. They got 24 gig of RAM, 12 gig extended and 512 gig of storage, 5000 hour, 5000 milliamp battery with 70 watt fast charging. So 0 to 50% in 16 minutes. And they've got AI camera features like AI Erase and universal tone for accurate skin tones. So techno packing in the punch in terms of like a camera phone, you know, with the AI features and with with their own, you know, their own imaging system. They're kind of growing up and making a making a play into the camera space. Breathing light is what this promotional video called out on the back. That's crazy. It's got Dolby Atmos. So I would love to get my hands on this phone. Like they've been making a lot of ways with affordable phones and not that, you know, we don't have many, many other phones to kind of review. But yeah, I'm kind of a big techno fan, like, like kind of in a far away parasocial way. I'd love to like, you know, actually personally meet a techno and spend some time with it. That sounds really weird, but I mean, that's how much we like techno around racing has not has not been confirmed. And it's, you know, like they're going to vary by region and they haven't confirmed it's going to be available in the United States or not, even though it's got a global launch. So we'll see. But very, very curious. I'd love to get my hands on one of these. So unfortunately, when a lot of these smartphone companies say global, they usually mean excluding the US. Except the US, right? Yeah. So anyway, all right. Cool. True. Some good hardware. Let's get into some apps. Yeah. They'll ample through the apps. All right. Let's get started with you. And just real quick. Tick tock is releasing a kind of Instagram competitor called tick tock notes. And that's mostly what we know about it. It is only available in select regions. I try to download it today. Could not. I got a little nasty note from real place saying not available in your region. But the stop it. The thing that distinguishes tick tock notes from Instagram will be its staggered grid layout where normally with Instagram in your feed you see one post at a time. Kind of like in a vertical column. This is more like a staggered grow. So I mean staggered row or staggered grid rather. That's actually an Android term. And so think of it as Pinterest plus Instagram. That was exactly when I saw this. I was like, what is this? Pinterest? Yeah. Imagine Pinterest, but with tick tocks. Yeah. And that's it. Pintox. And this is great timing to roll out a new app right when they're back to you. Yeah. I mean, it, it, it, it claiming to clear focus when, when play through had that little red message, like not available in your region. It's like, well, I, I see things that things have come to bear. But yeah, there's others similarities with Instagram. It's going to have photo carousels, chronological and other in the fees, common controls and more. So I guess if you're in a region that has tick tock notes, which by the way, I don't like the name at all tick tock notes. And it looks like Pinterest. Yeah. Who knows? So if you're not able to use tick tock notes and have some feedback for us, write us contact at Andrew Fiesel.com because I am definitely curious. Maybe one day it'll come to the US. Maybe one day maybe never win. Have you been following the news? I know. I'm just saying maybe. Maybe. I want someone to let me know what it's like. Notes makes it sound like a productivity app versus like a photo consultant. Like it's weird. I missed the thing with Instagram. Yeah, I don't get it. All right. Well, Google rolled out as usual a bunch of stuff to the Google suite of apps. So we're going to blow through me and Jason going to blow through him right now. Google messages is rolling out the selfie GIF. Excuse me while I vomit. Users can record a three second GIF of themselves. All you got to do is long press the camera icon in the text field or tap a prompt in the conversation. The GIF recording starts and stops automatically with a brief countdown. And you can also manually start and restart the recording. And these short selfie GIFs are saved. And this feature is not widely available even in beta versions of the app quite yet, but it is coming whether I like it or not. Do we need this in the world? I say the nay. But whatever. People love GIFs. Yeah. Yeah. It's not for you, Ron. It's not sorting your inbox. What I think could be interesting and what might happen with this is can you use the GIFs in other apps because then does this become a quick GIF? GIF maker tool for people to use across messaging? It says right there on the bottom of the screen showing right now that there's safety or camera roll for easy, charitable access. There you go. So this could be, if you're yearning for a quick way to make a quick GIF of your video of yourself or something like that, this could be the way to do it. All right. And then over in Google Photos, they're rolling out some new features based on code spotted by Assemble Debug. Good folks over at Assemble Debug. The first one is hide clutter option which allows users to hide backed up memes, screenshots, and GIFs from their main photos tab, which I absolutely need. Oh my gosh. Revamp memories UI which will display uniform rounded rectangles with a thumbnail image from the album, which is also very useful. Disable AI memory title suggestions. Allow users to turn off the AI generated title suggestions for memories in Google Photos because they are so cheesy. And then clear cloud storage from the app. Google Photos is also preparing to introduce an option to clear cloud storage space directly from the app with a single tap. I am very, if you take a look at the change log of Google Photos over the past year and a half, two years, that product team has just been cranking, right? Like there has been so much on the Google Photos side and each one of the, every time they roll out something like, oh, that's handy. Like I just got the stacks activated in my Google Photos and I was like, oh, that's great. It cleared up my library. I'm pro what they're doing on the Google Photos side. Not so much on the Google messages side. You don't like your GIFs. No. Unless they're in Google Photos. Then you like your GIFs. Well, or they're like a movie that I like. Yeah. What about maps? Because maps is getting a bunch of stuff too. It's one of those apps that continues to get a lot of new features. Sometimes some of it feels a little bloaty. But some of the features coming actually very handy. If you've got an electric vehicle, a bunch of EV specific features come into Google Maps. It's going to show AI powered summaries describing the location of EV chargers based on user reviews. So it can kind of summarize, enter the underground parking lot and follow the signs toward the exit just before exiting. Turn right. Give you that kind of information that's pulling from reviews. When you're searching for nearby chargers, maps will actually display real-time information like which ports are available, the charging speed of those ports. So you can find the right one for you. When you're trip planning, maps will suggest optimal charging stops along multi-stop routes. And that ties into your vehicle's charge level and trip details so it knows that you've got enough power in your vehicle to make it to that next charger or you should stop sooner. A lot of the EVs that have the built-in system do this already. So this is kind of replicating that but in the Maps app. Google Travel Search will have a new filter to find hotels with on-site EV charging stations. A lot of EV stuff here. And users can leave more detailed reviews about their experiences at EV charging stations such as like the type of plug that was used, the type of time they had to wait. I got to say, when I was in Texas in March when I was in Dallas, I rented an EV, a Hyundai Ionic or whatever it was. And I've casually driven my friend's Tesla like we were at a wedding and I just drove it to the hotel and back. But it was my first time of having an electric car for an extended period of time and it was like worrying about I'm in a strange city. I'm in a strange car. I'm watching the battery percentage go down. I don't even know where a charger is or how to do it. So this would be welcome in that situation. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's not an ideal situation to be put into your first kind of like EV. So stressful. You get used to it as with anything and that goes away but. Yeah. I mean that's why Hertz is trying to sell off all its Tesla stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense actually. And then Google Maps is prepping satellite connectivity features as well. The new features going to allow users to update their location and maps every 15 minutes via satellite up to five times per day. So basically like a like a safety precaution feature sort of thing built into maps based on code. So this isn't something that I that has really been announced necessarily but will likely come in the future. And that is the Google Maps update. That title makes you think Google Maps preparing kind of satellite connectivity features. Don't you mean GPS? Yeah. That's true. That is a little different different satellite though. All right. Cool. So let's go to wrap it up for apps. Let's dive into we got a bunch of emails in response to the recent episodes in response to last week's episode actually. So let's get right into when you've got the first email. And the first email is in response to the interesting poll that we took last week on what VPN do all of us use and why isn't it Google Ones VPN? Well, guess what? Timothy Carter wrote us in to let us know that, hey, he just wanted to say that the VPN was the main reason I subscribed to Google One. I use it on my Pixel 6 Pro which also seems to have circle to search. Sorry, Ron. And have the family sharing options to my wife and use it on her Samsung S20. Timothy Carter, Timothy, thank you for writing us and letting us know that someone was definitely using it. So apologies to you that it is going away. The whole reason to have Google One was for the VPN. That's why. Wow. So I guess the question is, is that Timothy, are you getting, are you going to get rid of Google One now that it doesn't have the VPN? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's, what's the next best option for you? Let us know. Nord. Nord. Proton. Yeah. A bunch of options out there. Nord. All right. Our next email comes in from Mike from Ohio who says, hey, this is Mike following up on setting the Pixel Watch 2 ringtone from last week's episode. If you remember last week he wrote in complaining about his Pixel Watch 2 not be able to change the ringtone. Not wanting to quote, unquote muck around with ADB debugging, I purchased the feel the where 2 app from the Google Play Store, which is the one that I found and suggested. I installed it on my Pixel 6A phone and Pixel Watch 2. After enabling permissions on my phone to notifications, I was able to set my Pixel Watch 2 ringtone to one of four options in the feel the where 2 app. I wish there were more ringtones to choose from or the ability to select one from the phone. Beggars can't be choosers. Well, they can. But this is a step in the right direction. Hey G, enable ring, enable ringtone selection on your watch like the competitors have done in their wear OS implementations. Keep up the great work. Keep up the great podcast. Mike in Ohio. And yeah, I mean, at least one step closer from not being able to change the ringtone at all on the Pixel Watch 2 to using feel the where 2 and having four ringtones to choose from. That's progress. But not being able to pick your own ringtone, I find just baffling. It just seems like that's just such a cool functionality to have with the watch. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. Well, Mike, I'm glad you got some customization going on in there. And our last email comes in from Andrew from Ontario who writes in to say hello from Thong, Northern Ontario. During episode 40, it was mentioned that Android 15 would introduce a new home control screensaver which immediately caught my attention. I have repurposed a Samsung Galaxy A10 that I used to control my smart lights. It's wall mounted, with the display always on and showing the Google Home app for whenever I need it. However, I have a couple of issues with this setup. One, the Google Home app would eventually burn in on the display. So I enabled the photo frame screensaver without choosing photos just to get a blank screen. The color screensaver isn't customizable to just black and I don't want to display bright colors at night when I sleep. Fine. It works. Number two, the Google Home app will close after a while so even after tapping the screensaver away to get to the Home app which should be open, I may have to reopen anyways. This new Home control screensaver should solve both issues and reduce the number of taps I need to perform. That's rad. I'm the guy this feature is for. PS, I realize my A10 isn't going to get Android 15, at least not officially, but this is still a great addition for later down the road. Best regards, Andrew of Ontario. Is there any better feeling than feeling you're the person the feature is for? You're the guy. Yeah, totally. This might not be for everybody but it's definitely for me. And others of us out there. Google put together a wonderful little package just for you, Andrew of Ontario. So they call it the Andrew feature. Very cool. Well, thanks everybody for writing in. You can email us at contactandandroidfaithful.com. We love to hear from you. Keep sending in those emails and keep sending in those bug droids. Love to get those graphics from y'all. So indeed. And with that, we have reached the triumphant conclusion of this week. Episode of Android Faithful. Thank you so much for watching and for listening. We'd love having y'all along. Michelle, what do you want to leave people with? If you want to see more of what's coming on Android 15, as you can see, I'm busy every week. Just diving into every update and finding out all the new stuff. And as I mentioned, I got a huge backlog of things to go through. If you want to see that work before it's published, you want to talk to me about Android 15 or anything else related to Android. Which is exclusive to Patreon subscribers. So go to patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon and join the community to talk and nerd out and geek out about Android with a vibrant community of like-minded folks. Very nice. That is patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon. Thank you, Michelle. What about you, Wynn? Hey, yeah, you know me. I'm an Android dab and doing it for like 12 years now. You can find stuff I do on Android development at my website typing.com. I did want to teach a little bit and actually promote a YouTube channel that I've been kind of obsessing over this week because my loop broke and I've been trying out Garmin. I've been trying out different things and I found this really great channel. If you are a fitness enthusiast and a wearable enthusiast and you want to know about like, if you want a scientific breakdown of like the different algorithms and like what like Polar and Garmin are doing, check out the channels of quantified scientists. He actually does and it compares the different algorithms that like Apple watches using and like, I don't know, Garmin and Huawei and Samsung are using. So anyway, like I just found it really fascinating because I'm going through a little bit of an upheaval in my fitness tracker life. So anyway, just wanted to promote a cool channel. Check it out, quantified scientists if you're into wearables and want a lot of information on it. So. Cool. Excellent. Cool. There it is. And the fireworks are finally on my side of the world. You can follow me on social media at Ron XO. If you're looking for something else to listen to, head over to ifanboy.com. We released our monthly media explode, which is no relation to text bloater, by the way. It's a nice little coincidence. Podcasts where we talk about TV and movies and we actually talked about Dune 2 on this podcast. So if you are curious what I thought of Dune 2 spoiler, liked it, didn't love it or hate it. You can tune in to that over at ifanboy, as well as all the great podcasts that happen about comic books and stuff like that. So there you go. I really enjoyed it. By the way, I mean, I expected to be bored and I know I don't give a, but basically in a nutshell, I really, really liked it. It looks beautiful. It sounds beautiful. The, the amount of praise it was getting when it came out was just a joke. There's still, there were story issues with it. You know, there were a couple of, you know, it's hard to add up. So it wasn't perfect, but it was damn near close to perfect. And it looked amazing. So yeah, it really did. I'm happy I saw it in theater. I didn't see the worst one in theater. I'm happy I saw the second one in theater. As for me, as Ron said, no, no relation to media explode, which I never made that connection. Like I had to explode. I'm pretty sure I told you a couple of times, but it just, it just didn't react. It didn't connect. I'm not sure why I was so convinced that Texploder was my thing that I just plugged my ears and went, la, la, la. Anyways, at Texploder on YouTube to subscribe to the channel. Also, texploder.com. I do have a podcast website. If you just go to texploder.com, you can subscribe to the podcast for the first episode coming out in about a week and a half. Really looking forward to it. But that is it for this show, which is, as you know, Android Faithful. We do this show every Tuesday evening. And we do stream it live to the DTNS YouTube channel as well as the DTNS, or sorry, what is it? It's a Good Day Internet Twitch channel as well. So if you want to watch us live, you can do that. But, you know, you should probably just subscribe to the podcast. I think that's the best thing that we can recommend and subscribe because that's important. Also, if you want to support us via Patreon, you can. Patreon.com slash Android Faithful is where you go to do that. And, you know, we're going to be here each and every week talking about all the crazy things happening in the world of Android, especially coming up. We've got Google I.O. coming up in a handful of weeks, a couple of weeks. We're all going to be there. And so we're going to have a blast. We're going to have a lot to talk about. So definitely stick around. We'll see you next time on Android Faithful. Bye, buddy. I haven't seen that one yet, wait. I have not seen that one yet either, by the way, too. The laser show. That's a laser show. That's too funny. I looked up something about it because I thought they were disabled. So I really quickly looked up how to enable them. And then I turned it back on. No, they weren't off, but then I learned about that one. So I was like, shoot. Yeah. That's wild. All right. All right. So now it is time for everybody to head on over. If you haven't already to af.showbot.tv and we can see is a free show title. Is it? That's a free show title. A raccoon punched me. Yes. We can't do free show titles. The one with the giant list of Instagram notification channels. That was. Yeah. That was pretty impressive. Pinterest, but with TikToks working hand in glove. It's just a little weird. The great Google un-siloing. I'm a pro pincher. That's a good one. The great Google un-siloing. The great Google un-siloing. Only Android fans, if you know, you know, you know. Jeez. Two plus one love. Oh boy. Google restructuring. Drink. Nice. The pixelization of everything. Meta VR versus Google XR. Fight. That was a lot of titles. Time. Channeling Instagram. I'm the guy this feature is for. I'm the guy this. Pinterest, but with TikToks. Yeah. The shape of your phone bumps. Washable virtual reality. Ah, noise cancellation. Earbuds Beatrix kiddo would wear. What? Earbuds Beatrix kid. I don't, I don't know that one. I don't know that one. What was the one that we were looking at? The great Google un-siloing. The great Google un-siloing. Yeah. I think that's the one. Yeah. Cousin of Jaws. You are the winner. Beatrix kiddo is the bride's name. Kill Bill. Kill Bill. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh. That reference. Yeah. Kill Bill. Probably the Tarantino film. Yeah, that makes sense now. Yeah. Now that I think about it. I wonder, I was like, one of these days I'll watch it again, but it's one of the few films that he's done that I'm like, I don't really care to watch it again. I was slowly not being able to see my monitor. I realized because I have flux installed and it was like, I forgot to disable it. Oh, and it's like, it was just going, it's like go to bed. Go to bed. Go to bed. Oh, God. All right. Well, it is 931 on the dot. So, Jason, you've got to go to your fam, so. Yeah. Then I got a message during the show that Savannah, Savannah, when she was picked up from Girl Scouts, put Stacy, my wife on the spot to take her and her friend from Girl Scouts to the habit for dinner. So they've already dinner. Oh, I'm sorry. But that's okay. I'll hang out with them. Yeah. You gonna meet them or can you go? Well, yeah. They're downstairs. Oh, hi, Savannah. Oh, there she is. There you are. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Everybody's saying happy birthday to you. What? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's saying happy birthday to you right now. Oh, no. What the heck? I don't know. All right, baby, I got to finish up and I'll see you downstairs. All right, we're good. I'm not going to do post production stuff until probably like 8 or 8 30. So it's going to be a little bit later, but I will get it out. Awesome. Yeah. I'll get the show notes done right now and they'll be waiting for you. So. Okay. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week. Thanks, y'all. Nine times. Good night. See you later. Bye. Oh, I should not leave studio. Hold on. No, I should end stream. I will have studio.