 Welcome to Android faithful your weekly source for the latest news hardware and apps in the wide beautiful world of Android dance into the theme song as always I'm going to it now I think I'm the next in order I'm Jason howl I'm Robert Richards I'm the Solomon we didn't talk about that part of the pre-show like what the order was we're just rolling I just know I went first so we got we're jammed to like I'm looking through this rundown just a little behind the scenes we've got some organizational stuff that we're working on around the show in the you know but behind closed doors also known as Trello and you know it's it's just it's it's been an interesting system because we're able to just like throw all the stuff in there throughout the week and I'm looking at a rundown now and it is packed I'm wondering if like it feels more packed than normal but maybe maybe the stories are grouped together we're in that like post-ces pre-mobile world Congress like lots of leaks lots of rumors right lots of stuff swirling kind of in the world but like not very all but also but also like nothing major and like earth shattering right I mean I guess I presumably the entire tech world is obsessed with the dumb things on people's faces while they're driving the Teslas but from across the street but we won't talk about that everybody seems to have forgotten about Google Glass and all the jokes they made at our expense I mean I mean really like a lot of the same people who are rah-rah were once like you right this is the same people right exactly yeah I'm sure I'm sure there's no you know nobody if you go back to their Twitter 10 years ago they weren't making fun of glass holes anything like that while they're wearing their goggles yeah I'm just curious I know it's the Android faithful but are any of you actually interested or going to go try out the Vision Pro I'd like to try it out 100% oh I totally want to try it I'm totally trying I might try it out this weekend and I'll report back to you yeah please do no I just haven't I haven't had the inclination to go to an Apple store to try it or yeah you know and I also think anybody spending $3,500 on that thing it's just like geez yeah that's a lot of dough to drop on but I definitely want to try it I mean I mean Michelle you've been on the show recently we've been talking about the infinite canvas and like the XR displays and things like that so yeah I want to I want to see what they're doing with it I definitely want to try it I'm not gonna buy one though so oh yeah because the integration with Android devices like non-existent shocking there there's our Android spin on the Apple face computer all right man all right well before we get started want to thank everybody in the last week who's gone over to patreon.com slash Android faithful and showed your support I know I got a little I was sleep deprived last week got a little wacky talking about it but a bunch of you did pull the trigger and sign up so we want to thank you all and remind you that you can sign up at patreon you can get an ad-free version of the audio podcast of this podcast no ads in your feed you get access to our exclusive discord and if you sign up at 20 bucks a month you get a t-shirt which much people I've seen I get a lot of notices when they're shipping out and so people a lot of the gear so we appreciate everybody's support for the show so you get shout outs and you get exclusive content which is totally applicable today and you get yeah yeah that's true there's good point you get to vote on what we on stuff that we talk about later in the show we're gonna do the patreon news pic and this week you're getting some patron bonus content because not to not to bury bury the lead I don't know what that I'm getting a cold but later in the show we have an awesome interview with someone from ASUS about the ROG Phone 8 and we had to cut it down for time this week because we can't fit the whole thing and because it's such a great conversation but if you're on patreon you can watch the whole dang interview all it's like 25 minutes of videos gonna be up there on patreon right after the show tonight so check that out yeah check it out yeah alright well should we get to all of this news that Michelle wrote this week so much why don't we just start with you Michelle this sort of breaking news all over the place sure why not I mean it is that time of the year we're in February and if you remember last February is when Google released first developer preview of Android 14 and the year before that I think it was also February so you know we're it could be upon us any moment now Google could be releasing Android 15 developer preview one this week or next week who knows too soon right too soon too soon yeah so because of the way like Android development works there's also simultaneously this QPR beta program that's ongoing and a lot of those features that you see in these QPR releases are actually in development for Android 15 rather than the QPR releases because Google tends to hold off on a lot of major features for the next release instead of like the minor releases which makes sense so while digging through these QPR beta releases I found potentially three somewhat major changes that could be coming in Android 15 the first one is this feature that allows you to share media audio to nearby devices so those of you are familiar with the new Bluetooth LE audio standard that was announced a couple of years ago Google's been working on adding support for that into Android since Android 13 but there's also this newer feature that the Bluetooth special interest group announced that built on top of LE audio it's called AuraCast and this is basically a one-to-many broadcast feature that allows you to basically have one source device send out like a signal to any Bluetooth LE audio device nearby and you're basically broadcasting your audio to many many devices not just like one device but two devices you can have three four five many many devices for a single broadcast source and Google is preparing to add support for this feature or better support for this feature in Android 15 by adding a dedicated page and settings to connect to and also start an audio stream from your device right now the LE audio I think is not fully enabled on the pixel series I think Google is probably waiting until potentially they release a pair of Bluetooth LE audio enable pixel buds we don't have any details on that if that's ever happening but it looks like Google is gearing up to make LE audio and AuraCast a more prominent feature in Android 15 nice and then another change that they're looking to do is related to making apps take up more of your available screen space so for a long time apps have had the option to fill up your entire screen if they wanted to so like you have your status bar at the top and your navigation bar at the bottom and it's up the apps whether or not they want to draw content underneath those bars and it's there's a reason like Google hasn't enforced this on app developers and it's because you have to take some special consideration into account because you might have some overlap between the navigation bar and a certain button so like developers have ways to work around that of course but that's kind of the reason why it hasn't been forced on to apps at the moment but it looks like that might be changing in the future because that's part of this compatibility change in the QPR beta that says that Google wants to enforce edge-to-edge mode on applications that target Android 15 or later right now that compatibility mode isn't enabled on after-target Android 15 but if Google were to choose to enable this then it's possible that you know this is something that Google could be forcing on developers down the road and I see when is like wincing right now I would get the change so I was muted to I I I don't like it and I can't it's hard to go into details on why I don't like it and I think very recently my current job I had to do some work with like full screen and and it's it's difficult because number one yet traditionally when you have content that draws behind the bars behind status bar and the navigation bar there's like usually a reason usually it's because media right or you know you want an immersive experience and I just don't think every app needs to be an immersive experience and the problem is if you don't handle those situations correctly you might have important parts of the screen that you don't anticipate as or your designer might anticipate like you know being occluded by these like UI elements so it's it's weird because I feel like ever since immersive mode came into being it's been a thing that Google has been really pushing on us but it's just one of those things that I think a lot of developers don't find the need for it so they don't they don't you know take it into account because it's not it's as of right now it's optional and it's not really again it depends on what your app is like if I'm like a bank app do I need to be immersive mode no but if I'm a media immersive bank app right you really got to see your whole statement just wrap around buddy and so that's kind of like my thing is like I just think this is I get why they're doing it because in general the APIs around immersive mode are extremely confusing and extremely hard to deal with so that also discourages people from doing that so I think for you know in in this like you know 2024 of like you know wrap around where everybody's flagship phones are like wraparound screens and all kinds of crap like that this kind of enhances those experiences but it's just I why why now I'm gonna have to worry about bugs coming in where oh there's buttons under like the dang bar and I'm like yeah I wasn't under the dang bar like two versions ago but I don't like it is it a step towards consistency no it no I don't I I mean I guess I guess yes and that it'll force developers to do it but I just don't see the wrong it's a step to a consistency in the wrong direction in the wrong direction I just I don't see it but yes when Google breaks our stuff we have to fix it so in that case yes wild well if this is any indication Android 15 is gonna be a roller coaster everybody so buckle up well the more positive news there's one feature that I think you probably don't have an objection to it's the support for built-in app archiving so if you're familiar I think earlier last year Google Play rolled out in automatic our app archiving feature that takes effect if you're low on storage Google Play will basically swap the app with a stripped down version of the APK that retains your data but basically which heavily reduces the size of the application installed on your device so that you don't have to fully uninstall it and then reinstall it later on and then sign into your app all over again you can just archive it come back to it when you actually need it and the only issue with the way it was implemented before it was that it was only part of the Google Play store itself it was not built into the OS you couldn't go into the settings of on your phone and then archive the app from there you have to do it from Google Play and you couldn't do it manually you could only have it automatically apply whenever you're low on storage but Android 15 looks to be building support for this feature right into the OS so that you can go into settings and manually archive an app if you want to and also they look to be integrating with the existing unused apps feature which removes some permissions clears the cache and other stuff after three months or more whenever you haven't used an app for a while and it looks to be integrating with that so that it'll also archive the app when you haven't used an app for a certain amount of time okay I like app archiving sure that I'm okay so far Android 15 shaping up to be I don't know it still feels I suppose very early we're kind of outside of the realm of of these big number releases being major you know ground shaking things so it's always these little things you know these little tweaks and everything so tweaky tweaky is that's the direction we're headed not the case for Amazon though Amazon likes its ground shaking news it's it's rumors yeah totally so I was kind of thinking about this and my husband and I were talking about this news a little bit so you know like how sometimes you like you have a show and at least off on a cliffhanger and you are waiting for the next season the best kind of show there is the best kind of show there is absolutely and then you know because you cannot hide anything from the internet anymore you get like a casting call like news and you find out like oh that character that died the actor just came back and did like you know several hours of filming you're like huh I wonder if that means something well Amazon kind of did their own little like casting call kind of like spoiler thing last week where basically they posted a job listing for fire TV and that's listening by the way is down now which you can find it via way back machine but basically the long and short of it is this job and review basically tipped Amazon's hand that they are moving the fire TV client away from Android and to native slash react native so basically through a job posting I feel like someone did not clear this but through a job posting we pretty much have it confirmed that the direction they're going and that what they're working to is moving away from Android fire TV so yes this is this is reportedly the project Vega OS which we've heard some like you know kind of rumors about but I don't know feels kind of substantiated if they're hiring people for it so and there you go and this was basically similar to the stuff that Yanko Rodgers when we had him on last year yeah he saw a job listing it was like that sort of thing that triggered this so like they've got to get people to work on the stuff right so it's yeah it's an interesting conundrum to be in right if you if you're working for a company you're trying to do anything under you know behind the scenes you know in secret and yet you still have the need to hire the people with the right experience and so you need to put the word out in a way that doesn't entirely you know lift the veil and you need to be specific about what kind of people you need right right exactly you can't get away from it and also it's I assume it's harder to hire if you're not like a little bit transparent about the work you're doing I mean they were they were completely transparent very much they want to hire someone that quote implement and deliver features on the fire tv client code base as it transitions from fos fire os slash android to native rust and react native like well I think they would be fine as it if they didn't say as we transition from yes exactly okay as we secretly transition from they forgot to put the word secret in there and then we would have all ignored it I just imagine like someone in marketing like you know got an email about this and then they went over to engineering like hey y'all wait a second just who posted that bill did you post this it's like yeah you told us we need people it's always carol it's always carol carol carol deserves a break okay carol is overloaded yeah let's take it easy on carol when I when I posted about this news someone brought up a good point that um that the job listing only mentions fire tv transitioning away it doesn't confirm that fire os in general is going away so um like I it's hard for me to imagine amazon ditching android entirely especially for its tablets because like if they were to develop an entirely new operating system just for the tablets they would lose out on so many applications that are available on android right now for the fire tablets but doing it for their tvs makes more sense because there's not that many applications that you need to have ported over to a tv and amazon is enough market share to get the dozens of developers to port their applications over yeah it's a good point yeah maybe it is just the tv um well we'll see we know something's coming I mean honestly like one of the things that got kind of swept under the rug coming out of ces was I was expecting a big showing from amazon in the tv space during ces that didn't happen right and so I know you know yanko had us you know kind of I I subscribed to like 2024 is going to be big for amazon and tv and I'm still waiting for that to come to fruition I guess so this is it though yeah it's just this is why it's big maybe not I don't know um you know what's going to be big in 2024 circle to search seems like every uh every week now we're we're talking about this in some way shape form why are we talking about this week because it officially launched for pixel devices you could already kind of get it on the new samsung devices and now the pixel 8 and the pixel 8 pro got their little secret updates their silent updates that enables uh circle to search I've used it a couple of times and I gotta say it did exactly what I needed it to do I was watching a video um no sorry I was on facebook marketplace someone was selling a boom mic that I'm considering buying but he was also selling it with this other like this like stand for it that that looked like it didn't ship with the mic but it had no information as far as what the stand was and so I used circle to search and it identified the stand like it was able to figure it out so it was awesome it's like oh wow that was kind of magical but Michelle you wrote about this you said that um it can do some things that we weren't shown uh in advance that it could do what are those things well it's just a nifty way to enhance the way you circle to search so if you're if you try to search something that's hidden behind the search bar um if you didn't know you can actually fling the search bar to the left side of the screen you can move it from the bottom to the top to get it out of the way and also if you're trying to search something that's like really small you can actually take two fingers and pinch in and zoom or zoom out because it's literally taking a screenshot that you can actually pan around that's this is why they want this is why they want 100 full screen on all apps y'all so like it's just so people can just fling around the screen search bar I mean you're jokingly but like no I like it right I'm actually kind of thinking that's like serious there it's like a long term like hey this will work for these super integrated highly immersive features that we want to do but that's being said I'm not criticizing circle to search at all I think actually circle to search is probably the most interesting and kind of like it you know there's there's very few things these days that surprise us with my mobile phones and trying to find a feature that is both simple easy to access is not too hard to teach like any range of like smartphone users and that's actually useful is yeah delivers on its promise delivers on its part it's really hard to find in 2024 and dang y'all I think they kind of hit it in the park was just something like through a little surge it's simple but it works and it's innovative and it's a new interface right yeah what I think is interesting about it is as we have talked on previous episodes it's not like this functionality didn't exist before exactly like we could do it before yeah but there's something about narrowing in in such a an approachable way you know like like if I had an image on my phone I could I could do a lens capture of this and say you know I want this but if there are other things on the screen there were ways for it to get confused and everything like that with circle to search it's basically the same thing except you're saying crop out everything outside of this area zero in and yeah and that and and the fact that you can do it with your finger and you don't have to like draw crop window you know like grab the brackets and everything you just kind of scribble it and so it makes it approachable and and it works yeah so yeah it's a great feature it's a great extension of a feature thank god samsung gave it to us thank you samsung for everything that we have on android oh man I feel I feel like we need a graphic or a bumper about find my device like we need some sort of like or a sign it has been x number of days since we've checked in on find my device yeah like what's the latest uh so basically the latest is that we're still waiting we still have to wait and the reason is because google and apple are both waiting on each other before they can roll out respectively their features so google is waiting on apple to roll out unwanted tracker detection on ios and uh apple is waiting on this specification for unwanted tracker detection to be finalized and published by the um standard's body that handles these certifications you know on the web and they're working with many other companies to do so and basically one of the directors who is like managing this mailing list for this specification announced over the weekend or i think goes on friday they announced it that um they're they close the call for feedback and they're going to conduct a review of the charter at their next meeting and then they're going to send this a charter to the community for more review then they're going to do another final review on the charter and then if all that goes well the absolute earliest that this specification can be put into the next charter would be march 16th and if this sounds really bureaucratic that's because it is that's because there's a lot of companies involved there's a lot of processes that need to be followed there's a lot of eyes that need to be dotted and t's and be crossed before you can get a standard into this um online standards body and unfortunately that means android fans you have to wait for the roll out on the find my device network because google has already committed to not rolling that out until apple rolls out unwanted tracker detection on ios and apple is waiting until this specification is finalized before they roll it out and even when the specification is finalized we don't know if apple is already like has an implementation ready or if they're going to begin development on it like we don't know what that timeline is going to be so it could be maybe april when all this starts rolling out or it could be the end of this year like we have honestly no idea and it could be never i'm just saying sure seems like it in a sea of in a sea of possibilities it's not a zero percent chance of um yeah but i hope it happens okay so we i think what happened at some point right i mean they're pretty much working to it but michelle i just don't know what's gonna happen as fast as you wanted to i'm about to start finding a castle balcony y'all start singing someday my prince will come or someday my find my network with my device will come y'all it's the new it's the new one plus marketing so all right um well cool well to round out the news like we mentioned at the top of the show if you are a supporter of us over our patreon at patreon.com slash android faithful you can help us pick what we're talking about tonight uh every week on monday we offer up three stories that we're considering to include in the show and let the patrons vote on it uh this week i gotta tell you everybody very disappointed in you very disappointed in the way this one went um because we had three very compelling stories to discuss um and i need to see them so if we can do that great so uh the story that i was rooting for came in last everybody and that was the phone maker behind cat and motorola's rugged lineups has shut down um only 13 of our patrons were interested in rugged phones which was heartbreaking to me rugged phones just don't what they used to be ron exactly they used to be all the rage and now they're not exactly um the 30 percent of you voted for google photos set to get a new my week feature thanks to an apk teardown but the winning story that we're about to discuss right now is the fact that chromecast with google tv is now serving full screen auto playing ads with 56 percent of you uh wanting to discuss that so what's the deal here uh basically auto playing ads have started uh being served to chromecast with google tv home screens um the ad that was noticed was an ad for chicken tender wraps from carls junior um which i don't have carls juniors here in new york so i probably didn't see this that was very probably regionally targeted um prior to this any ads were usually limited to digital content um and of course now people aren't happy with the product placement um so i guess the question is how do you like them chicken wraps um i'm so good right now i don't know i'm kind of liking it right now it looks good i'll i'll take that i don't have any carls juniors around here either so just i mean it's probably gross but it looks good i mean i okay let me ask you okay i'm gonna play devil's advocate here i'm gonna like we'll do a little bit i'm feeling a little salty i have a i have my google tv chromecast with google tv whatever the hell it's called you know whatever i see sponsored content in that rotation in the form of media suggestions all the time yeah right so what is the difference between a disney plus or hbo max or whomever buying that slot to promote something you can watch on it with carls junior buying that slot to show you about chicken tenders right and now i i know the answer is at least they're promoting content that i can watch with that device versus it's just a commercial for um for chicken tenders but google's whole revenue is based off ads like why is this a surprise yeah i don't think it's a surprise as more of just annoying because a lot of people when they want to turn on the tv they want to just quickly get to the app they want to launch yeah to watch whatever they want to watch right and like these full screen ads you got to like press the button down to go down and then like readjust your muscle memory basically or you're like your memory of where to go for launching your content hold on hold on stop talking just stop talking this looks really delicious well hang on a second they're two for six dollars nobody told me that i'm starting i don't know why we're podcasting right now i just need to go get these and dip them in that sauce because because the ad is showing just in the rotation in the rotation of it so if i go down if i click down again i just will stop the ad from running right it's it's it's not like non-skippable right i honestly have no problem with this i mean i'm someone who is generally annoyed at the amount of streaming services anyway and how that that whole other like that industry yeah that whole other segment industry wants my money if it's like a non-obtrusive easily you know bypassable ad i i'm equally annoyed by all these things and it doesn't you know what i mean like i can go and watch my youtube with that and you're right ron i mean to be fair stuff costs money i mean capitalists whatever yet aside it's is google's business can't be surprised so i don't know i do like i do like the irony of this is where this is the people paying us money have chosen us to talk about google making money by showing an ad this is a real snake eating its own tail kind of yeah here's your tip right or if you care if you don't like all ads that are being put in the launcher surprisingly android tv still lets you uninstall the stock launcher and replace it with the third party one so you can totally liberate yourself from that and just have a robe apps that you want to launch that's what i do on my shield tv it's there are no ads or anything it's just a row of apps that i launch free yourself from the chicken wraps go ahead there's a pro tip there you're a pro tip from michelle right there you don't need to be on twitter for it just tune into the show yeah and i mean on the on the flip side we have people watching our live feed right now that are willing to throw us five dollars yeah five ninety nine euros two dollars and they aren't getting a chicken wrap at the end of it true good point well keeping point though jason that no one at watching the carls jr ad got a chicken wrap they were just alerted i don't know i think actually that ad was done a two for six dollars percentage and by the way i got a chicken wrap if you're listening to the show as a podcast you're missing out the live experience because the chat room is talking about food and roya rogers came up and now i really want a fried chicken right now because there's nothing like stopping at roya rogers on the new jersey turnpike and a rest stop and getting fried chicken and a yes that was uh yes ron every every every road trip to to to new york city from maryland there was like there was like a molly pitcher rest stop right rogers and it's like the only roya rogers left that we could get to so it used to be there used to be one of penn station in the in the amtrak section so i used to when i take the train into the city i'd go off to amtrak get some roya rogers then go off to cbgb's or wherever i was going that's long gone so now and now it's just the new jersey turnpike anyway um well ads in chromecast i've yet to see one i use the the my google tv or chromecast every day my kids use it i am seeing sponsored content but it's media-based i haven't seen just blatant ads so i'm going to be on a lookout for it and see as long as it's not uninterruptible i'm okay with it the moment it becomes i have to watch this ad to get to the content f you i'm out you know right yeah that is i think a big yeah that's a bridge too far so um before we move on i just want to thank three of our patrons for helping bring the support to the show uh joe furness and david formeski and kirk korles you guys are awesome you guys have been supporting us from the beginning way back during the summer um thank you so much for your support uh joe david and kirk without you and without all the other patreon patrons on patreon uh you make the show happen so we really appreciate it thank you so much um cool so with that let's get to the main event right jason all right let's get into the main event it is time uh we are in the hardware block right now and uh before we get into any hardware news we thought we'd give you a hardware interview we're actually um yesterday uh had a chance to chat with shihou kung uh from a sous about the rog or the rog there's a few different ways in this interview where we could have you know said the company name wrong said the phone name wrong i think we got it right for the most part but i just got it wrong the rog eight phone and about gaming phones in general so we're going to go ahead and play a piece of this interview for you right now here you go all right we are super excited to talk about a phone with someone who knows a lot about the phone that has come up very frequently on the past episodes of android faithful we have with us shihou kung who is the global technical pr and emea territory marketing manager for smartphones at a sous welcome to the show it's great to have you here thank you very much yeah it's a pleasure yeah and probably a pretty exciting time right now with the uh with the release of the rog phone eight and we're excited to kind of dive into this with you i think primarily just right off the top you know i think that the story from the outside appears to be because we followed i mean with android faithful and then with all about android prior to it we've followed the kind of journey of the rog phone over the years and the and this idea this like emerging idea of like a phone that is specifically tied to being a high performance a device for gaming and rog phone has always been right at the top of that that wave and with the eight seems like the story is changing not that it's not a good gaming phone it's still a great gaming phone it seems like but it's also becoming more of more of like a mainstream offering and so i guess i'm curious to start off with tell us a little bit about the story of this device why why the story is a little different this time around right i think well this year we launched the rog phone eight right so it's it's our seventh phone we skipped over the number four due to uh how should i say superstition in in the chinese culture so this is our seventh device and you could say that for the first six of them they followed a very tight formula very similar of course there are changes and additions they've evolved over time but more or less following that same foundation that we set back with the first ROG phone and we're looking at this type of cadence you know every three years or two years four years we tend to do some changes this time i would say or i think a lot of people out there see that we've made our biggest change right so what are some of the reasons i think when we look at device categories so not specifically smartphones but if you look at categories within smartphones or you know device look at laptops as a big device category and then you have these sub categories within with you know with smartphones gaming the notion of gaming smartphones really began back when we released ROG phone one i think we were i think there was us and maybe one other brand at that time and then more and more entrance you know in the first years is they are more exploratory we try to define of course we define what a gaming smartphone is from our vision obviously and then the market will respond to that and we iterate we collectively the industry tries to figure out what what features work really well and what features might just be temporary in a sense so that evolved and moves over time android gaming one could say that mobile gaming that speed of demanding power is slows down a bit i think we will see a increase again uh with you know advent of ray tracing we might see you know a big leap in demand of performance but i would say now we're kind of at the tail end of pushing really powerful devices to run games right i don't know if you remember back when pubg came out pubg mobile you know running 60 or 30 fps 45 and then you know up to 90 and most devices couldn't do that nowadays even the new games you can run them quite okay with let's say a regular top tier phone so and over these years we've also figured out what our users want because in the end when we do ROG phone the way we have done it can be extremely polarizing for for some people i mean some people love it and some people will say this is not for me right and to kind of go extremely hardcore into a certain aspect it's something that we've deliberately made you know let's say for going certain everyday usability features to to drive that cutting edge performance first hardcore performance first in a way i don't i'm not familiar if you cover like laptops follow the gaming developer in that space back when gaming laptops were new because i've been doing gaming laptops for for years as well you know the designs they were wild they were crazy i remember maybe five six years back exactly we even put water cooling inside you know a gaming laptop you had like the first uh high refresh rate gaming laptops they were 3d displays that was actually the first time it wasn't used for high refresh rate because that was not a thing but to do 3d we had to do 60 plus 60 so they were actually 120 hertz displays so and then yeah exactly and now you see this year at CES we introduced a new ROG zephyrus of course we've had our ROG zephyrus line for quite some time and that is more muted let's say more refined looks more like a regular laptop but of course has all of that gaming power so ROG 8 is following similar where in the beginning we're exploring the category we're doing a lot of crazy things pushing the boundaries and then of course as the market grows as people come in and they want more things from their devices you know we see this type of development and I think it becomes maybe how should I say I think the market or all of you might put a lot more weight into this change because we only have one phone per year right so if we had like a big range we might see a ROG phone that's very gamer-y similar to the past and then we had maybe we would have a more streamlined discrete ROG 8 similar to our laptops where we have the streaks and the zephyrus lines and the flow and a lot of different designs but with with the ROG phones we only have one device per year so the contrast becomes bigger yeah and you're probably right we may have I mean may have over analyzed it because when we first saw the eight we're like oh they're taking more of a step towards the middle or more step towards the mainstream from a visual standpoint which I saw as a potentially good thing because you know like someone like me I'm not a hardcore gamer but I like to play games every once in a while and I want to I want to do it and I don't necessarily know if I would go the full LED blitzed out experience so like so maybe being in the middle is a good spot I don't know how do you feel about that yeah I mean it is of course intentional that we designed the ROG phone 8 and especially the 8 pro within this type of look and we've gone for a display or a panel that has a hole punch right instead of having no no cutout and just bezel we wanted to combine these different things that we're looking at you know in the past the ROG if we look at ROG phone 7 it is very large it's a large large phone for many reasons one of them of course being that we have bezels we have front-facing speakers so they are more uncomfortable to hold they're more comfortable to hold maybe from a gaming perspective but less so from a smartphone perspective so it's always this battle between these two directions in a way right because every year we've been quite clear that the ROG phone series it is not a handheld console it's not a game console it is a smartphone so we need to keep in mind these smartphone features and if we put you know the line in the middle 50 50 in the past I would say maybe we've gone 90 towards gaming this year we're probably not as much maybe we're 70 towards gaming but we're still far away from the 50 percent line whereas the regular smartphones they might be on the other end 100 percent 80 percent 90 percent or whatever that may be so we're still in the realm of it it's a gaming smartphone so if there was any questions about that you know in our own minds this is a gaming smartphone and it really shows when you start using the device and looking at the the things there that it is not a regular smartphone so I kind of want to follow up on that that spectrum point that you brought up just now like the ROG phone 8 has maybe a 70 30 split between gaming and regular smartphone it used to be in the past that regular flagship devices from other brands maybe had 100 of regular smartphone features and 0 gaming but now you're kind of seeing a lot of regular devices have some gaming-centric features like they have gaming dashboards gaming modes performance modes and all these tools that are available within the software and also they have some hardware features you know vapor chambers and a lot of cooling systems built in so I'm kind of wondering now like is this shift towards the ROG phone 8 becoming like gaining features that would be appealing to those consumers is that more out of like trending towards the market demand or is that because of increased competition from regular smartphones because I'm seeing a lot of people at least like some publications ask is there a purpose in buying a gaming phone in 2024 considering that regular phones have kind of caught up in terms of performance and software features like is there still a real need for gaming phones what do you have to say to that I think let's say my spontaneous answer or my initial answer to this or very candid answer is if you're asking the question if if a gaming smartphone is needed then a gaming smartphone is not for you right and you know that the type of user that we we have looking for gaming smartphones or looking for the ROG phone series they definitely you know this question doesn't come up like do I need the ROG phone or maybe one of our competitors because if you think about it we are a very small brand within the smartphone space we're not you know one of the big ones for sure so all of the users coming to our devices they're switching over from regular smartphones so all of our users 100 of them in the past have been using regular smartphones of course we've lost users surely along the way you know some people use one generation maybe switch back to another brand and so on but every year we gain users and most of them are coming from regular smartphone devices let's say non gaming smartphones because that's what's out there and we're not seeing any slowdowns in in uptake if I should say that but of course answering your question Michelle it's more like the regular smartphones the way I see it is the when we're looking at top tier performance or top tier mobile processors the demand for thermal dissipation goes up every year within the past years so I'm sure you're very well aware of this if you look at the Snapdragon series from Qualcomm it's Snapdragon 8 you know from the 845, 55, 65 and then you had the 888 and then all the plus with gen 1 which was so-so and then you had gen 2 and gen 3 actually the maximum power that these processors require or can pull from the system it goes up every year efficiency goes up but the maximum power also goes up so you will see a lot of quote-unquote regular smartphones increasing cooling systems like vapor chambers and graphite sheets and you know all of these things that gaming smartphones started first they're doing it out of a necessity is my guess they have to do it because the the maximum performance that you are able to take from the processors requires that but what you will also notice that the priority in performance will be very different from a regular smartphone with a flagship processor versus a gaming smartphone so we're prioritizing different things whereas for our g-phone we're prioritizing performance performance over time and the ability to control your performance whereas let's say a regular smartphone might prioritize a consistent level of performance but prioritizing let's say heat or stability over time in that those have a sense or even battery life so they will be more aggressive in throttling the performance they will be more aggressive in managing the thermals and these type of things and they offer usually less control for for these type of things yeah so i i think definitely gaming smartphones still here there is still a need for it or need there is still a demand from users who want to have more control more fine grain for example the rg phone we put the cpu or the processor in the middle of the device whereas most brands put it near the top next to the camera so when you play in landscape mode that's what most games are played at your fingers are the furthest away from the heat spot which means we can drive the performance higher for longer and you won't feel as much discomfort and of course it allows for our cooler attachment that can directly cool that area so if you really play a lot on on smartphones you'll notice that there is still a distinct difference between a regular smartphone and a rg phone and on well she it's it's been a pleasure talking with you about this phone especially considering how much it you know every year year after year it bubbles up to the surface and we have you know we have a lot of people who are fans of android and then of course you know as i'm sure you are aware there is the microcosm the smaller kind of group of really passionate android gamers and they're the ones that we hear about when we talk about the rog phone i am not like a a super like devoted mobile gamer but i respect that there are devices out there this is like one of the things that i love about the android ecosystem is that there are manufacturers makers of devices and hardware like asus who are creating hardware that might not appeal to everybody it might not be perfect for everybody but it certainly has its audience and on android you can find that kind of specificity and i just think that's really cool that you all are continuing to kind of double down and and see how you can develop this this brand even further so she how kong it was a real pleasure to have the opportunity to talk to you today thank you so much for hopping on and telling us all about the rog phone 8 yeah thank you thank you it was pleasure to be here absolutely we'll have you back we'll have you back again when the nine comes out or whatever you decide to call it who the heck knows yeah she she how kong thank you again and thank you all right bring everybody back on the stage and we can look at one final screenshot of our interview in the video version okay we'll remove that now uh cannot hear you ron sorry i was muted while we were listening to the interview my favorite thing about these sort of conversations uh is that when we're able to go right to the source because here we are looking at the rog phone eight and we're like oh they're going for the mainstream and they're not they're like no we're a gaming phone like it was they just they just went with a little more muted design this time around but that yeah like so i appreciate having our conjecture debunked when we can so i i was i was really sad because i didn't get to make i got sick yesterday while i'm so sad i'm extra sad now i couldn't make it and i think the more that uh she how was talking that makes a lot of sense because i think traditionally the branding around gamer you know hardware has been very big and bold if you were in the chat with us if you were listening watching live you know i kind of mentioned like alienware and kind of like these you know these big bold statements about hey like gamers we are here for you and as much as i think as a gamer i enjoy the aesthetic in theory i don't necessarily want you know or want to pay the premium for something wild and crazy i i do you know want to i don't know i i think from i think i think um there's a difference between just like with fashion like the high fashion concept conceptual thing and then the thing you actually wear and take home there's a bit of difference so i think listening to she how that it makes a lot of sense to kind of tone it down and like you know and and a lot of things he said make a lot of sense and i just also want to make the point that it's so interesting to hear him talk about performance and there's a distinction between you know when google talks to us develop android developers about performance it is a vastly vastly different kind of performance than what you know asus is is is aiming for with their phones and that's just a really great point to make um and anyway i will say i will say on the on the look of the phone though i mean i've gone on the record for many years saying that i want a phone that does not look like everybody else's phone on the subway and the rg phone always is that and even this rg phone eight like i like the little cool thing the little logo thing that lights up whatever like like those are cool like i do think they're cool i think previous versions have been a little out there but i still think they're better than the the black you know candy bar phone design that we've that we've got so bored with so yeah yeah indeed well big thanks once again to asus and for she how cool for spending some time talking about the phone should also point out we mentioned it earlier but if you are a patron you get the full unedited interview we had that that was basically like half of the interview and so we've got more more information to dive into with she how about the rog phone eight so patreon.com slash android faithful yep and big thanks to michelle for making that connection yes and thank you michelle for hooking us up yeah man awesome that up all right um now into the rest of our hardware starting with you win yeah so it's really funny because yesterday i booted up my z fold five z fold five for work and i texted the i texted uh i think maybe one of you guys is like oh i kind of miss this phone i might be looking at the z fold six well apart from you know when looking for the next default six and that we might be able to anticipate with this new generation of foldables from samsung is possibly cheaper uh models and this is kind of all speculative but basically up from a report by the elect which is the which is like a you know kind of a news source from run by the korea electronics industry media um they're reporting that samsung display uh presumably the portion of samsung that makes displays is attempting to try a different method to make the bezels of foldable OLED panels uh and so it seems like for a long time samsung has been asking the display division to you know make you know the displays and the bezels themselves cheaper so that presumably if the cost of manufacturing is cheaper the end price for users will be cheaper well they're considering a very interesting technology uh specifically for the device bezels and that is inkjet printing yes samsung display i uh i actually want to explain this is actually pretty cool but um yes uh samsung display sorry i have a visceral reaction anytime i hear inkjet yeah like um so the whole idea is basically lowering cost so without going into too much detail which i don't actually understand anyway but the way that so these bezels are you know the bezels of these OLED panels are used to hide you know kind of like the guts of you know the the foldable panels like the circuits and everything like that so these bezels are meant to kind of hide you know the internals so what happens is when you have like the kind of the base raw panel that is like the display those get wrapped in a thin film to project them from like oxygen water and the elements and then the bezels are you know kind of laid over on top of that to actually you know hide all the you know kind of internals and then over top of that you get the glass limited thing so you know that actually ends up being the full screen and of course the infamous screen protector that some people rip off which are not supposed to later so the bezels you can kind of think of them almost like when you make cookies and you have like a certain amount of dough right and like kind of like the challenge is to get as much cookies out of one piece of dough as possible uh and so it's kind of like that like basically these you know there's different processing methods to make the film that they cut the bezels out of and the current one is called is called something that it's called MDD and I forget what the what the full you know expanded acronym is but you know it only allows for a certain amount of film and then they cut out the bezel and so there's a certain cost associated like per bezel right so what the inkjet printing and I don't know how I really don't know how the inkjet printing would work but apparently if they use inkjet printing over the current manufacturing method they can actually like make get basically more bezels out of the you know make either make I don't don't understand but basically get more bezels for the more bang for the buck more bezels for the buck more bang for the bezel more bang for the bezel I like it more bang for the bezel which means that you know for a certain amount of cost they'll get more bezels out of it which drives the manufacturing cost down which ultimately could mean cheaper folds and flips for us so anyway it's really cool you know I I did it is inkjet printing I don't know how it works but yeah this is all kind of a bit speculative but it has been that fine cheaper product manufacturing methods to lower prices for us we'll have to see how see how that shakes out but because we don't know yet but that is a report out of the korea electronics industry media I I didn't know how bezels worked and now I know that they're kind of like cut out and you could we can print them now you can you can print them with inkjet like so it's kind of like the bezel protects the over scan or whatever or like you know what I mean I think I'm probably saying that wrong but is the bezel just like a little bit of overlap of the pixels underneath or am I thinking about this wrong when I think of inkjet I think of like a layer on top of the display yeah I do actually remember when I was touring the samsling factory when when they invited us to korea for galaxy unpacked I did see bezels being printed like I didn't know that was inkjet printing but I saw I'm like wait that's how bezels were made okay yeah the original acronym is something about there's some kind of like drying process so it probably is similar to printing where you know there's a liquid that is kind of that that is like laid out or something to create the film and then it has to dry and I don't so anyway yeah maybe so that I mean I guess you can kind of think of like how inkjet you know like how printing works where you have a liquid and then eventually it does dry become more solid so something like that I guess oh okay cool I know yeah it's really yeah and just hearing like the whole process but yeah um I couldn't help but think of like trying to squeeze out that last Christmas cookie out of the last piece of dough but kind of basically kind of like that idea is just to get the most out of your raw materials um just make cookies out of bezel bezels in the shape cookies in the shape of bezels not bezels in the shape of cookies although I would gladly take a cookie phone but we're talking about food so much I am so hungry um but if you are hungry for an entry level you know foldable even though Samsung kind of did protest quite a bit last year whether they would actually you know produce a more affordable lower priced phone they might have just been I guess I don't know trying to keep a surprise for us because you know the code names for the new generation of foldables have leaked and there's a q6 and b6 which you know presumably are the flip in the fold and there's a third one there's a q6 a and we all know that you know obviously the galaxy a series is you know the more mid-rangey lineup so what do you think q6 a could be a cheaper cheaper fold is the q that folder is a beef is that is that what we've decided decided on but anyway um just if we're looking at code names it could be that samsung is finally looking into adding a foldable to their a series so I don't know people which which is the better way for Samsung to go if they were going to have an a series of their foldables to take the $999 device down and do the flip or to take the really really expensive one and give a lower cost version of it you know what I mean like which is the better approach like really making a very affordable flipable in general or foldable or foldable this seems so inaccessible right now right approachable yeah that's ding dong is with too much money uh I think I think if you I think if you get to the point where you can boast the lowest the lowest cost foldable on the market from samsung that is a that's a as a marketer that's a marketing message I would run with yeah for sure right yeah I think you're right I think it also makes sense with you know kind of like with the other foldables that we've seen that are kind of inching the price down like the magic v2 I guess the one plus that the the open is cheaper with with with all the trade ins and other discounts right so I don't know inching it down little by little kind of makes sense um and yeah so just the last thing um something that we do kind of expect from the flip flip six z flip six the upcoming you know clamshell foldable will be a larger battery so the way flips work now that they actually have two batteries uh one in each half and uh it looks like the flip six will have a significantly you know a big a good bump in battery capacity um could be looking at a total of 4 000 milliamps which is pretty dang good for as svelte or in small and and classical as those as those clamshells are so there are your there your flip it there's your flipping flipping and folding leaky peekies for now uh cheaper cheaper and more chargey more charge cheaper chargey more chargey more chargey for sure I'm so hungry I can just think about I hate I have to admit I am too um you're both making me 100 I just gotta obviously did not do a good enough job of eating before this show and we had to start with Carl's Jr I even like Carl's Jr dang that out but you like that you like those chicken tenders man I mean I I would eat it if it was delivered on a platter to me right now I would eat it when I'm not talking of course and not into the microphone um but that's not gonna be right now because I'm gonna tell you about HMD which uh I think when I think of HMD I think of Nokia and apparently I won't be thinking of Nokia for much longer when I think of HMD because if you remember HMD actually bought Nokia the brand back in 2016 from Microsoft which bought the brand in 2013 so Nokia has been this like hot potato and it's been pretty stable for a while with HMD but HMD has been hinting at their own hardware and last year they actually said they had plans to release original HMD devices uh and phones they said from all new partnerships now HMD is teasing its hardware portfolio that's smartphones tablets and wireless earbuds and rumors say this is all gonna happen at Mobile World Congress which is just a couple of weeks away February 26th through 29th and what I couldn't tell out of this is okay so does that actually mean that they aren't gonna do any more Nokia phones or does that mean that they're gonna do some HMD and they're gonna do some Nokia or maybe they continue to do Nokia is like a flippable thing or flip you know the like the feature phone flip thing and not smartphones I don't know I mean doesn't it sound like they lost they don't they no longer have the exclusive licensing rights oh that's right I did see that you're right there's something about losing the licensing but I but I thought that they didn't lose it for another couple of years so maybe they're ahead maybe it's no longer exclusive to them maybe like now other companies can use if it's not exclusive we should look into that maybe we can get our hold on the license for the show it could be uh Nokia faithful oh that's a merch opportunity I recently bought a pin that's like a Nokia 3 3 10 that has like the snake game on it so I mean obviously I'm an idiot that bought it so I'm sure not that y'all are idiots I'm an idiot but I kind of imagine the the the value on the Nokia brand is waning right like because because of things like that when you're talking about like a nostalgic pin from a phone 20 years ago what is that doing in the in the world today right so well let me tell you um oh yeah sorry michael I go even a waning Nokia brand though it's still far more powerful than it should be as a brand just gotta say so like I this doesn't seem like good news for them yeah if you think that we should buy the the branding for Nokia go head over to patreon.com slash Nokia faithful and no it doesn't actually you are all does not exist please don't don't come now I can't even do redirects on patreon do you think Jason someone's gonna start a Nokia faithful podcast we will have given them a bump all right um one last little rumor for us before we move on um you know we're in that time period where the anonymous sources are swirling right and the latest ones out there are telling actually telling you michelle and android authority that a new pixel fold two is on the horizon all right so then yeah so this nugget here is that the device might skip the tensor g3 chipset and go right to the g4 as recent prototypes have been seen with could mean that the device launches later as a result this would likely shift it to an october release with the rest of google's hardware portfolio at the fall event and also could be google's first device with 16 gig ram but who knows these are all anonymous sources and speculations so we're we're we're definitely putting this in the keep an eye on vile and we'll see if uh anything else comes comes to light on this topic so yeah i would just take this report with the granistal like who knows who that author is you know it could be it's little nobody yeah well i mean this says this is by michelle ramon so uh i don't know who that is he's not reputable that's all we're saying but anyway i don't know who that is oh wait i pushed the wrong button there so um but stay tuned on that looks like some developments happening on the pixel fold so all right let's get excited about well speaking of michelle we should uh we got a lot of a lot of apps off to talk about here with quickshare don't we right so google and samsung announced back at ces i think that they are rebranding nearby share to quickshare and that they are merging the two uh services together so that you can have them be interoperable with another and that rebranding has started to roll out to android devices that previously had nearby share and um it's kind of rolled out a bit widely now like i have it on most of my devices a lot of people have told me they've gotten it on their devices and it's basically just a name change and a new icon a new ui and um not really much new functionality although there is one new thing which we'll talk about soon but uh check your android devices it should have already rolled out to you uh by now and i think starting today also 95 google reported that the rebranded quickshare is also rolling out on windows too so check your pc if you have that installed to see if that updated branding has appeared um but i mentioned that there's not new functionality except for one thing so last year google was experimenting with putting nearby share targets directly into your share sheet so that when you try to share a file you don't have to tap nearby share and then the device you want to share to you could just directly select the device you want to share to from the share sheet and uh they disabled that functionality like after it was rolled out for a couple of weeks and it never came back until now until the um rebranding with the quickshare has rolled out they've also brought this old functionality back so now when you go to quickshare file if you look at the share sheet you'll see your quickshare devices appear directly there um i don't think like random devices won't show up in the quickshare list but uh your own devices that you have signed into with your google account will appear in the share sheet when you invoke it and uh those are some of the changes that have rolled out recently with quickshare and actually there was one more thing there was a post from a quickshare product manager i think on the samsung korea community forums saying that um i think in q3 later this year that the windows versions of google's nearby share and samsung quickshare applications will be merged or integrated uh they didn't really elaborate on exactly what they mean by integrated or merged we'll probably find out like hopefully it means that it doesn't matter whether or not you have the windows version of nearby share or the windows version of samsung's quickshare installed they'll both be interoperable and compatible with one another very nice i you know i have not i just never i never share files between my devices so i haven't actually checked i actually just well i rarely ever do i don't i don't know why either i mean i do but i know what i do i'm so i'm so old school about it like it's i'm on my mac desktop and i'll use slack to just upload a file and then slack on my phone to download it locally right um we've got our old hacks that it's really hard to undo our old hacks exactly because i think i do the same thing but i haven't shared a file like on my device that would you know benefit from this i just assume this will never work do you see quickshare i look at my the open i assume this will this won't work on a os x desktop ever right like this like so that was what i what i would like but well there's nothing technically blocking that like if google were to port the nearby library which is what nearby share or quickshare and is now based on over to mac os and then release a quickshare client for mac os that you could download then theoretically you could share files but right i don't know if google wants to invest in the engineering you know effort involved in that right or if they're going to i could just use google driver slack that's what i know so yep all right um cool uh all right wait we haven't talked about ai a lot in this episode we haven't no which like talk about ai yeah let's do it would you like some more ai in your maps um because general generative ai is coming to maps i think we kind of like talked about like the the initial kind of rumors or feelings or whispers about this feature but it is coming uh so yeah generative ai coming to maps and what this will basically do is allow maps to leverage all those you know delicious google llms to allow you to search more easily for different things whether that is a very specific thing or very broad thing so the the examples they've been giving is like hey you're out and about in sf and you want to go to places with a vintage five that's very specific right but you know kind of with the power of lm and these models you can ask google maps for that now and not only that not only can it kind of take you know this more you know natural language very like specific questions but it's also kind of incorporating things that we've seen in the past where there's like a conversational dialogue where you can ask for hey i want you know these vintage this these vintage vi places but then you can also follow up with like okay how about lunch so there's like a lot of integrations of you know a lot of the google's different ai you know ip's of like you know the generative ai with a conversational thing and the whole point is to try to make you know searching easier in maps and you know it also will take you know these results that is got that it has provided for you you know using these more kind of natural language um you know interactions and being able to add a lot of generative generative ai is doing these days is to group them to help helpful categories um you know summarizing carousels all the like kind of photo carousels and kind of picking out like you know representative you know images all the things that you know we've been seeing as like the strong points of this generation of generative ai are coming uh into maps so yeah and and there's I really like the use cases that you know and this is this is all coming from a uh a post from google so of course it is marketing things that take away the green salt but you know they they're really trying to emphasize you know the naturalness of doing this conversational flow and for another example they give is like you're if you're out and it starts to rain you can you know try to leverage you know maps and ai to kind of quickly search for hey how about activities for a rainy day and then follow that up with you know you know questions like hey what about options for the kids um so and then you'll be able to kind of take these things and then of course share them organize them for later so there's a lot of you know this using ai to increase the you know efficiency of searching for information of finding information as well as kind of you know being able to kind of parse that information into things that are useful to you as a human being um so this feature is specifically launching to local guides first the local guides is a program in google maps where the people that you know all these years have been the most active in reviews and posting photos you know and are very active become like you know local guides um and they're just basically people that are known to be active on google maps and are participating so basically this feature is rolling out to them first um so yeah we'll just have to see how it shakes out oh apparently we have some local guides in the chat like pervade attendance clinton woodward is a local guide so yeah clinton if you or any other of our local local guide android faithful happened to get this let us know if you try it and work it i'm actually pretty excited this is kind of like anyway sorry i'm also a local guide you i'm not very active but apparently apparently i've done enough to become one of those and i got invited to something or whatever so i will keep an eye on it as well along with clinton but yes i'm a local guide so would you use would you use like would you use shirt first vintage vibe sure i love vintage vibes if you like this though yeah so now that you know you can use it like this maybe you use it like this so exclusive yep so uh speaking of google maps and some drama going around it we were talking recently about how um assistant driving mode uh a lot of people have been a lot of chatter in the android ether has been about how assistant google assistant driving mode is going away is dying off um but google actually clarified the nine to five google that assistant driving mode isn't actually dying much like google assistant recently last month it's just losing a lot of its key features that's all um so users will lose access to the app launcher within maps uh this is set to roll out on february 7th which is actually tomorrow at the time of this recording so on wednesday february 7th um and so basically what is left is uh media controls so there you go so yeah a little media controls down at the bottom of your maps great it's just severely hamstrung at this point i mean honestly the media controls are pretty much all i used it for yeah it's fair good point so okay i guess that's good news yep it's kind of clear that google is doing cleanup on a lot of these features that oh yeah we're useful but barely anyone uses like they also got rid of a lot of assistant features although i know a lot of people were kind of upset at some of the ones they removed they also recently removed the nearby places feature in the google phone app so um you can't like look up a business number just by typing it in the in the dialer app you don't have to go to google search or google maps which is what i'm assuming most people did and which is what i've always done which no that drives me crazy because i i did it the other way i would just open up the phone and start typing the name of the restaurant i was ordering takeout from and it would give me the number and then i stopped doing that i got very angry yes i love that feature yep i tried to do that i tried to do that earlier today it was so convenient i didn't do it i was like oh man i'm really sad now i have to go over there or do the search what was me but if you can do sorry but you are right it does seem like they are doing i don't know if it's tech debt or house cleaning or laying groundwork for future things but yeah there is a lot going on uh there in mountain view and other offices that are making stuff happen so um very curious what the end game will be so yes indeed so that's gonna wrap up this week's uh news hardware and apps right that's right it's feedback time feedback baby my favorite contacts at android faithful dot com send us your emails like howard howard was one person who sent us emails and actually one not multiple just one that i'm aware of howard harris says at first i was very disappointed when the microphone on the front page search bar did not bring up the assistant when i'm in my home and i want my phone to answer that is how i always call up assistant if i use the keyword i will get three other devices answering before my phone don't i know it shortly thereafter i remembered there was a gesture available to me swiping diagonally from either bottom corner will also bring it up as long as it's been an activated um oh it's been activated in the gestures setting that works wonderfully and everything is fine for me now this guy is not falling anymore excellent towered i like a natural response to something that we're all frustrated with but then finding the solution and moving on like that yeah right there those are stages of like not so much denial but there was anger frustration and then acceptance howard got to acceptance which is great right i know i just said i understand why google's removing a lot of the other stuff for low usage but that is one thing i actually don't understand why they're removed because it's you're literally when you tap the voice icon on the search bar on the home screen it's literally just invoking google assistant yeah and you can already invoke google assistant through various other gestures as you know the reader just pointed out like so why remove this it's not like they're removing google assistant entirely but like why remove this one specific shortcut it's not like they're getting rid of any tech debt by doing that like i i don't actually understand yeah i um so i i can't get that gesture to work i've been trying to get that gesture to work since we kind of first talked about them getting rid of it so i don't know if someone has a video uh i know i'm a dev but i also have my days too where i just don't can't figure stuff out but i kind of agree with you michelle like when that when the when that bar first came out and they first they stuck both lens and microphone in there i know like a lot of my dev friends were like wow that is like busy and gunked up and like crowded as heck but at the same time i i i feel you like if they're removing tech debt and we're kind of cleaning things up i just there's still a bunch of stuff in there like and maybe that's not really technical thing but more of a ui thing but yeah it doesn't it just feels like more of a shifting and getting ready for gemini of five things rather than actually like i don't know it's just frustrating they'll place a gemini button there yeah before you know it and here you go this is the open okay i'm seeing the corner i can't and then also from the other corner how i'm just i'm just bringing up it's not enabled by default you have to go to gesture settings to enable the swipe you all right but it was enabled by default for me i did not enable that as far as i know but maybe maybe one of the cascade of setup questions i i activate well i'm gonna try to get it working while i listen to thank you howard for your email thank you howard all right michelle you got the next one this is from a patron it's from a patreon we had a patreon comment from kev who said um let's get pull it up quick thank you as a pixel eight pro owner i wanted to comment on the thermometer sensor and app usage like many others we bought a forehead thermometer during covid and the results are erratic likely due to both low quality and also inconsistent measure distance this week i've been somewhat ill and found using the pixel eight pro body temperature easy especially after repeated use to know how to position the phone on myself to monitor the low-grade fever i had it is also nice to be able to save a temperature history to see when it rises into clients my kids are grown but this would have been much better to have than the in armpit under the tongue or other places for parents to monitor child's temperature when they're younger that we employed always entered faithful kev and i wanted to highlight this because i too kev have been using the body the temperature body sensor on the pixel eight pro my daughter unfortunately uh you know came home from school last friday had a little bit of a fever and i've been tracking her temperature all through you know the past five days um and have found it to be extremely more accurate than the nine other thermometers i bought from walgreens and cvs over the years that all give various different kind of results um yes it's a pain in the butt to like hold the phone directly in the kid's face while they're watching tv and like you're covering their eyes um and also like the the motion of like you hold it in front of the face and then you move the phone to the temple um on a five-year-old that's a small distance so i gotta move really slowly to get a good reading um but i found it to be immensely accurate i compared it to the thermometer at the pediatrician's office while i was there i'm like okay you do it now i'm gonna do it i want to see the temperature and they were nearly identical so i'm very happy with this temperature thing by the way i know i know it's a it's an odd thing for me to be waving the flag for but i love it i think it's great so will you be sad if the nine doesn't have it no i don't know maybe i'm i'm becoming uh i guess the more you use it yeah the more i use it i'll be sad if they remove assistant from it um no um no but i i like have like keeping the like it keeps track over seven days of the temperature which is great i would it is kind of annoying and that every time you do it you have to set the age of the person you're doing it for i would like to have some presets like i i could see how this could grow to be much more useful um but i'm all in on it so it's very cool thank you kev thanks for your support and the patreon too we appreciate it at our last email from this week is from often feed often feedback writer ian hall and i do i want to say he was like an email the week recipient formally probably probably us but ian hall is writing to us again to talk to give us yet another app suggestion just wanted to let you know of an app i use multiple times a day but have never heard anyone mention uh but i've never heard anyone mention it firefox focus as the name suggests is from the firefox team and also as expected it's a browser but it's a simple one which you can open search for something browse the web and close it at which point all cookies history passwords etc are deleted the added bonus is that it blocks trackers etc super useful when you want to search for something and then don't want google to get all excited and push articles about it to you for evermore for example if i'm looking for hotel hotels etc in a town i plan to visit i don't need new stories from that town and my google discover feed for the next two weeks i find the app really useful and i'm sure others will too love the show ian hall want wantage wantage wantage uk um and yeah fire firefox firefox focus the no fuss browser i will plus plus one this recommendation i have firefox focus installed on my phone and it is i use this in lieu of incognito mode on chrome that's yeah so although although it's not enough to make it my default browser i don't know why but there it is firefox focus love it great suggestion ian thank you right on stuff oh and there we go we have reached the end yay whoo who's doing the outro is that me i can't even remember at this point there is no name on the dock so throw the ball up in the air so you catch us adjacent why you know it's fine i can take the outro uh we appreciate all of you so very much for your support and for hanging with us and um you know supporting us on patreon downloading the podcast telling your friends it all helps so thank you so much to everyone who watches and listens to this show android fapal each and every week also big thanks to our guest earlier uh just one more time really want to thank she how kong from asus for spending some time with us talking about gaming phones and everything that they have going on at asus um michelle why don't we start with you what do you want to let people know about you can follow me on twix masked it on threads reddit everywhere at michelle roman and uh also support my work at patreon.com slash michelle roman and if you'd like to support me now would be a great time because we are on the cusp of android 15 and i'll be really really busy diving into all the developer previews and the betas that are coming and that takes a lot of work so if you want to see what google is cooking up for the next release of android please follow me and or support my work there you go patreon.com slash michelle roman thank you michelle for three quarters of today's rundown even the interview you even set up the interview dude busy week yes very busy win what about you yeah i'm an android dev i sometimes speak about android developer things and you can find my talks associated video and code at my website randomly typing dot com and if you see a queen code monkey out on the interweb it's probably me i'm most active on instagram but yeah give me a follow and that's it yay randomly typing dot com thank you and ron what do you want to leave people with you just follow me at ron xo across all the different social media stuff and just keep doing what you're doing writing those emails to us uh go go support on patreon post on social uh if you have a friend who's into android tell them about the show uh pass along the link uh you know definitely we want to grow that audience and you guys are our best evangelists so please uh if you're gonna spread the word about anything spread the word about android faithful and tell your friends so tell your friends and thank you so very much everybody um as for me just go to yellow gold studios dot com sure that's where that'll take you actually to the uh the youtube channel um that i'm working on uh right now but right now you can find episodes of ai inside there that's my podcast about artificial intelligence with jeff jarvis or go to ai inside dot show and that will take you to all the episodes that we have so far and uh we have more planned so loving the show jason do you and jeff are doing great thanks good work having a good time trying to trying to fill out the booking you know how challenging booking an interview show can be and so i'm trying to like get ahead so that's taking some some work but we'll get there you know it's the beginning stages we get there um as for this show we already got there that's right because we're here in your ears and you're listening to it right now android faithful dot com you've already subscribed right and if you haven't you should uh maybe you've supported us on patreon right and if you haven't why not patreon dot com slash android faithful follow us on all the socials just look for android faithful or android faithful podcast you will probably find us and then of course you can always contact us contact at android faithful dot com to be part of the show in our feedback section and tell us what you think if you got some suggestions all that stuff let us know thank you so much for being a part of android with us each and every week we love you and we'll see you next tuesday on android faithful bye everybody