 Welcome to Android Faithful. Every week, we bring you news, we bring you apps, we bring you hardware in that order, or maybe not from the wide world of Android. I am Winswetdow. And I'm Sal Rahman. And we had Ron Richards in there for a minute. But I think you muted yourself. I muted myself. I'm Ron Richards. Hello, everybody. I'm back behind the driver's seat while Jason is off. And so there's gonna be little hiccups here and there. And that's what happens, because I'm human. And that's what... We are human. We're not AI. Exactly. Thank gosh. Whoo. Oh, speaking of which... There we go. We are just overly excited, because we have a very special guest today. And I am super excited to introduce not just a wonderful guest, a fellow Android dev, a fellow GDE, but a very, very, very, very good friend of mine, first time guest. And so to the show, Zara Dominguez, Zara. Hi. Welcome, Zara. Thanks for joining us. You are very much welcome. And I am very, very excited to be here. I think I've texted you so many times. I kept so many times for this show. I'm just really excited. And Zara said she's actually been watching and listening, which is always great to hear that other dev fam are, you know, watching what we do, too. Because I do think what we do is important. Zara, I... So it's funny, because Zara and I have been friends for years. We've, like, escaped from many escape rooms together. We've hung out all the time. And so I feel like I know you so well, but I know this is your first time on our show. And I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how did you get started in Android development? All right, cool. How long have I got? No, kidding. Yeah, so I'm based in Sydney, Australia, where it's bright and sunny today. And I am indeed from the future. I believe everyone's in the US. Yeah, I've been an Android developer for lots and lots of years now, more than 13 probably, since the very first Android public SDK came out. And yeah, I moved to Australia 10 years ago, and it's been a really good ride. I've seen everything in Android from, I can't believe if I think about it now, like what we needed to do back in the day to be an Android developer. So it's been a wild ride. Yeah, and I mean, Zara is not just a really fantastic, super senior capable developer on her own. Like I mentioned, she's also a GDE. She's been featured by Google in many different stories, not just as a developer and as a GDE, but also as a community leader. I mentioned all the time on the show how wonderful the Android development community is, as well as like our faithful, we love y'all. There is just as much love and community on the developer side, and Zara is a much a part of that from just being, not just, but from being also an engineer, but also a community leader, and you ran the Google developer group in Sydney for a long time. Yeah, so. When knows more about me than I do. I feel like I don't do anything. Cool, which is like absolutely totally far from the truth. But yeah, Zara is someone I've looked up to for a long time, both as a community leader and a fellow dev. And yeah, it's been really great. Just being friends in Android and being women in tech together. So anyway, really excited to have you on the show. And that was part of when, you know, Zara, that's why we're so excited to have you, not only because you're from the future, being a tomorrow in Australia, and you can tell me what the Lotto numbers are after the show, which would be great. Don't tell anybody else. No, but when we started up Android faithful, when I know like when we were brainstorming about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to do differently from all that Android, was we really wanted to hear from more developers, like give developers more time because like the people who are actually behind the keyboard making it happen. And so when when it was like, Zara wants to do the show, we're like, oh, that's a no brainer, let's do it for sure. So yeah, that's why it's great to have you on. And the fact that you, I didn't even know you watched the show. So that's great. Of course I do. Whenever when does something, I'm like, I'm there. Well, same as you. I support my girl. Yeah. Well, same as you. And it's been like that forever. I mean, just to go off on a tangent, like it is, this is like a whole other like show, but it is really hard being a woman in tech, especially I think when we first started Android. And so Zara and a lot of our Android, you know, women, a female identifying fam have been a big source of like support and strength and just like cheerleading and just inspiration. So yeah, it's really special. I just, just to let you know that the people behind the keyboard, there's like a special magic just as much from this side of it as it is from like the consumer side and a lot of amazing people that we usually have on the show. And then like amazing people like Zara that we're having on the show for the first time. Anyway, good guess you got Zara the whole time. But I guess we have to talk about some news and stuff. Yeah, cause it actually is a big week in Zara. This is a great time to have you on because are you like us that last week when the news of Android 15's first developer preview coming out hit, did you in a frenzy head over to the Android developers blog to check it out or? Yeah, cause especially as devs, right? It's always like, oh, what do I have to do now? What now? Especially if they have like breaking changes that's usually, oh, oh, we need to plan this out and figure out what we need to do. So it's usually the first like scan of like, are there any major things that we have to update too? Well, so, so yeah, so we talked about it last week how Michelle, I think we were chatting about how we knew Android 15 was coming any day now. We, I think we recorded the show on February 13th and we joked, wouldn't it be great if they released it on February 15th, right? Android 15, February 15th, they came so close. On February 16th, the news hit on a Friday. And just in terms of the big bullet points on the Android developers blog, you know, friend of the show Dave Burke, VP of engineering over to Android, shared the blog post, shared the news. They're very cool, spacey NASA-esque logo that they're keeping with that design schema for this version. But some of the big bullet points that they call that on the blog in, you know, of course include protecting user privacy and security. You know, some options about the privacy sandbox on Android, HealthConnect, file integrity, partial screen sharing. And then a whole section about supporting creators, how we're getting more in-app camera controls, support for virtual MIDI 2.0 devices, which I was surprised to see, which is pretty cool. And a whole bunch of performance and quality improvements and stuff focused on developer productivity. So wouldn't be an Android release without our resident expert, Michelle, who I believe Michelle, you talk about being in a tizzy of covering this last week, right? You had to scramble and dive into it. So when you looked under the hood of developer preview number one, what did you find, sir? Well, actually, I kind of want to correct you on that. I didn't have to scramble that much. I was actually pretty much done digging into it by like 3 p.m. that day. And the reason is because under the hood, Google has actually significantly, like, dramatically changed the way they develop Android. And that's like a whole different topic for another day. But because of that, pretty much the Android 14 KPR betas is they're almost identical code base-wise with the Android 15 release. So a lot of the things that I've been digging through for the past few months with those KPR betas, those are actually intended for Android 15 and we're gonna see them in this Android 15 release. And so when I was actually doing my deep dive into Android 15 DP1, there was like very few changes to talk about. And that's because a lot of the bigger stuff I'd already talked about in previous betas. But some of the things I did find in Android 15 DP1 include a new notification cooldown feature. This gradually lowers the notification volume when you get many successive notifications from the same app and you can apply this cooldown to all notifications or only conversations. This is on by default, but you can turn it off in settings. And this feature will be helpful in case like, you have a contact who just spams 10 messages at you in like five seconds, you know, instead of getting a ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, like 10 times and making a really loud noise, it'll gradually lower the volume with each successive notification. So, you know, you get the notification but you don't get spammed with the alerts from it. Another feature that they added is a new keyboard vibration toggle that allows you to disable the haptics in your keyboard app system-wide. Now, this requires the keyboard app to support it, but many keyboard apps already have their own built-in vibration toggle. This is basically just a way to turn it off from within settings. Another thing they added is this slight haptic feedback whenever you adjust the brightness on your Pixel phone. And if you have a Pixel Fold, they re-added the continue using apps on Fold feature. So, if you have a foldable, if you have an app open on the inner screen and you transition it to the outer screen when you, by closing it, on the Pixel Fold, currently only a couple of full-screen apps and games support going from the inner screen to the outer screen. This new setting will allow you to choose whether or not you always want apps to continue from the inner screen to the outer screen if you only want certain apps or games like full-screen apps that I just mentioned or if you never want any apps to transition. But something that I discovered is in a future release, Google is working on a new swipe up to continue feature where instead of having apps always transition or only some apps transition, you can choose when to transition an app. So, when you close your fold on the lock screen, on the cover screen, there'll be a swipe up little area where you can just swipe up and then you choose when you want that app to move from the inner to the outer screen. That isn't implemented yet. I had to dig it into the release to show the screenshot that Ron's showing right now on screen, but that's something that's gonna be coming eventually in a future release. And as I mentioned before, there's a lot of other changes that are in the QPR betas for Android 14 that will be actually coming in Android 15, such as the private space feature that I talked about before, the revamped chant bubbles experience for large screen devices, the easy preset mode, built-in support for app archiving, improved support for Bluetooth audio broadcasting, lost screen widget support for tablets, improved battery health APIs, potentially an app pairing feature, the built-in phishing protection, and a whole lot more that I also discovered after Android 15 DP1 released. And the first thing is a in-development feature that could protect your most sensitive notifications from scammers. And what I found is that it looks like Google is working on a new feature that will mark certain notifications as sensitive. And what I think is happening is they'll detect notifications with OTP codes in them, or in other words, the codes that you get when you're getting a two-factor authentication code from via email or SMS. And it'll detect that, and then it will market as sensitive so that they won't be delivered to applications that use Android's notification listener API. So this API allows apps to read and intercept notifications. And it's commonly used by things like your companion app to forward a notification from your phone to your watch and other apps that might need to read your notifications for whatever reason. But malicious apps could potentially use that API to read and intercept your OTP codes from your notifications. So what Android 15 looks to be doing is detect when there's an OTP code, market is sensitive, and then it won't deliver it to untrusted notification listeners. It'll only deliver it to trusted ones, which would be system apps. And then another thing that I discovered is this is a very minor change, but Android 15 DP1 now pins a certain key library used by the Android system web view to memory so that this will help the web view spin up more quickly whenever apps need to use it. And if you're not familiar, the web view is a component that a lot of apps use to render web content inside the app. And by pinning it to memory, it ensures that it's not perched from memory whenever the system is running low on resources. And then, you know, it's not perched from memory. It has to be brought back into memory, which could cause some jankiness whenever you need to load up something, you know, that relies on the web view. Cool. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's gonna be a lot more. And I already have more planned on them, just I need to write it up. So, yeah, if you want to find out what's happening at Android 15, keep on listening to Android Faithful. That's so hilarious because actually just, oh yeah. Oh, go ahead. Oh, well, sorry. I literally yesterday, I had an Android Dev friend come over my house and he was trying to show me, he wanted to test his app on my phone. And he was like, so what happens if I load my phone on the inner screen and I close your Pixel Fold and I'm like, nothing dude, you get a lock screen. So I'm a little, I should have installed the preview last week. But that's definitely my number one looking forward. Looked forward too. Is that the right grammar on that? Feature for Android 15. It's just for me, for my fold. Well, I thought it was interesting to see stuff specific to the foldables specifically around the Pixel Fold. And I, you know, Michelle, I have to assume this would apply to any foldable, right? This isn't just Pixel Fold specific, right? It would, am I correct in that assumption or that this is how Android operates with foldables, right? So. Right, I mean like one plus, they already have this exact feature that continue on by swiping up on the cover screen. Like it looks like Google was literally copying what one plus did. Samsung has their own version of the feature that's not swipe up to continue, but they already have their own transition feature. And Google basically playing catch up here, but you know, I think they're doing the right approach by copying what one plus did. Right. So Zara, is there anything here in Android 15 that's got you excited as a developer or? Well, not as a developer, but I guess more as a consumer is, I really like that OTP thing because now everything is OTP. And you know, just like, I'm pretty sure I'm safe, but who knows, right? So having that, I think extra layer of security would be very, very welcome. Yeah. I mean, the continuing effort to protect user safety and user privacy, I think just, you know, that has been a drum beat that they've been on for years now. And it's great to see that like that work will never be done, right? Like there's always improvements and changes that can be made and things are going to emerge and things they have to react to. So super glad to see it's still, you know, it's still a priority for them, right? Yeah, it's not always easy for us as devs. When it's always like the kind of two things where you're very glad for the users, but then as a dev, it can be very challenging. So it's like, I'm so glad for you. It's a lot of work for me, but it's better this way. It's better this way. Yep. Very cool. Well, yeah, well, anytime, I mean, the first release of the developer preview is the moment is like, it's almost like the calendar resets now, right? And for the rest of the year, we're going to be tracking these releases until August or September when Android 15 does get rolled out. It's probably too early to predict when it's going to come out officially. But, you know, we'll start that game up when we get closer in the summer as we get closer, right? Yep, think about your bets now. I would say early September is... All right. Okay. Michelle's betting early September. I have no idea. I'll just pick October because why not? Wait, was it August last year? What was it? What was 14? No, remember, there was all the bumps. Yeah, remember, got pushed and... Yeah, Ender 14 was delayed a little bit. Yeah. Oh, I don't feel good about October, but I'll take October because why not? Someone's got to get the Android. Well, very cool. That wasn't the only thing that came out of Google last week, right? Yeah. And of course, when did we not have an AI story these days? It's the New World. It's the New World's AI. And so recently, you know, Google rolled out, you know, their quote, most capable model, Gemini 1.0 Ultra as part of Gemini Advance, which is like the paid subscription version of Gemini. Well, not to be done by even, I guess to even outdo themselves. This week they announced Gemini 1.5, which is a next, next generation model. And they really went into a lot of technical detail. Kind of, I wish Jason was here because he is the AI guy. And so I'm doing my best here. But it does seem like they really are emphasizing a lot of the technological advancements that make Gemini 1.5 literally like better, stronger, and faster. And again, like there's a lot of good interesting detail, a lot of really good breakdowns. But basically they kind of mentioned two things, which I think is kind of interesting to note is that Gemini 1.5 use a mixture of experts, MOE approach to answering queries. So basically kind of before the LLM will basically run an entire model to process a query. Whereas with this MOE mixture of experts approach is trying to be a little bit more modular and specific when handling requests. And so rather than having the entire model process like something you ask it, it will actually route this request to a group of smaller experts, a smaller group of expert neural networks for faster and higher quality responses. I mean, I guess it's kind of the difference between going to Encyclopedia Britannica to answer a question rather than like say going to, I don't know, your professor that does that specific thing at college or at uni or something. So just kind of trying to be more specific and more efficient in how they process things, which again, higher quality and faster responses. They also talked about something called a much larger context window. And this is actually really cool. I think more or less, and anyone who's actually much better at AI can correct me on this, but context window is more or less the working memory during a session of the LLM. So they've mentioned that this is important because it helps their AI models, like any AI model, Gemini, Chachi, BT, or ever, have this concept of a context window. And it's basically the information that that model recalls during a session. And this Google post actually likens it to, trying to remember someone's name in the middle of a conversation or someone telling you a phone number to call and you having to write it down. The bigger that context window is, the more the LLM can retain that contextual information that is introduced during that session. And so obviously, as you can imagine, the more that it's able to retain in its working memory, the better quality responses and the more kind of connections and processing it can do for you. And so just to give it some scale, the previous version of Gemini had a context window of 32,000 tokens, whatever that means. But what's interesting is to note is that Gemini 1.5 has a context window that is 30 times longer. It's like a million tokens. So even if you don't really know what that means, in effect, what is gonna happen is that the new version of Gemini has this bigger working memory. It can take more text in, more images, more audio, more code, more video, whatever, and use that to respond to you and generate whatever it is that it's generating for you, which sounds really freaking awesome. It's not available just yet unless you're a developer and it is available via Early Access in Google AI Studio. So I think this just goes along with the theme of Google, not just kind of trying to keep up with the Joneses in terms of AI, but really trying to flex their muscle and just, even if it's a little bit very jargony and very kind of technical, just showing, hey, like we are doing very substantive, like very incredible things with our AI. So yeah, that's Gemini 1.5. And if you're interested in AI, you should number one, listen to AI Inside by our very own Jason Howell, but also, check out some of the articles out there that kind of have a little more layman's approach or layperson's approach to some of these concepts because AI is here and it's here to stay and it just keeps getting more advanced and bigger. My reaction when the Gemini 1.5 stuff came out was like, it was like literally last week, they rolled out Gemini and then boom, follow up with 1.5, like can't stop, won't stop, right? Yeah, can't. So Zara, I know we talked a little before the show started, you said you hadn't had a lot of experience with Gemini as of yet, but from what you've heard and this whole, kind of Google embracing AI and assistant going away in favor of Gemini, what is your kind of take on it as it stands currently with what exposure you have? I'm really interested to see how businesses like embed this in their apps, right? Because I remember like when the very basic AI, Google Assistant came out like years ago, everyone's like, oh, we're gonna put this in our app and then people can like talk to their phone and then it will answer and basically control the app with their voice, but like it sucked, it didn't understand people very well, it didn't understand accents very well, but it's been years since then. And yeah, as Gwen said, like, oh, Google can throw just all the money they have on this and make it instantly amazing. So I think it's just a matter of time when we see like apps actually integrate and use this models and all this information inside their apps and who knows what's gonna happen then, right, people are very creative. Yeah, last week's announcement was not as sexy by like compared to Sora from OpenAI if you haven't heard, but it certainly is very impressive because like I've seen people who have gotten early access posts about what they've been able to do with Gemini 1.5 and they're like having like an hour-long YouTube video or like a full-length movie inserted as a prompt and they're asking you questions about the movie and it's able to answer it. Like previously you wouldn't be able to do that because it just would not have enough basically memory to be able to go through and parse all that data, but now you can. So now you can entire, like for developers you could upload like an entire GitHub repository of your source code, like many thousands and thousands of lines and code and ask questions about it, right? So there's a lot of opportunities here and I hope they open it up soon so more people can test it. Zara, as a dev, what do you think is like the biggest barrier right now to actually, I guess integrating AI? Is it like finding something that is worth investing time in as a feature? Is it just, I don't know, like having to adopt a different way of like processing information rather than kind of like the straightforward like ways we do it? Like what do you think it would take for you personally to kind of like finally sit down and start like integrating AI into whatever you're doing for work or personal? I think it's really time because I'm like, I'm one of those devs who I try not to code in my spare time because I do that now. That's a good thing, that's a good thing. It's I do it enough during my day job. So, you know, it's, and I'm at the stage where I try to like, I'm gonna learn what I need. I really don't have time for much else. So I think at some point it's gonna come to like ahead where like, okay, it's, we have to do this now. But yeah, and also it's a lot of information, right? Like there's all these like jargon and all these things that I feel like if you haven't been there from the very beginning, it's a bit hard to like, what does this all mean? And what does this mean for me when I use it? So I think a lot of, and I'm sure like once it opens up, a lot of people will have like tutorials and write-ups and all those things because that always happens. People would always write about things and how you can use it. And I think maybe in, I don't know, how fast it's going, like maybe a year, it will be very different from where we are now. Yeah, if you just think about where we were a year ago, right? Like Jackson PT was like, was a novelty was like for people in the know or whatever it was just kind of early on. And that last time, I mean, Michelle, you kind of mentioned that, you know, this, you know, Gemini 1.5 not being as sexy as OpenAI Sora, but like stuff OpenAI is doing. And so like for those who don't know, Sora was OpenAI's AI driven video generator where you could enter in a prompt and generate up to 60 seconds of full motion video, which is like reality affecting, right? Which is like has major implications. Whereas the approach Google's taking is like, and kind of why I kind of like the approach Google's taking a little bit more than OpenAI is that Google already has this entire infrastructure when you kind of mentioned it, they're flexing their muscles, they're showing what they can do, but it's all done, Zara, to your point, in the lens of like, and this is what you can do with Google applications with this behind it, right? And it's much more productive in mindset or in like, you know, kind of user-focused, you know, whereas, you know, I'm not criticizing what OpenAI is doing either because OpenAI is truly disrupting and forcing everyone to go as fast as, you know, much faster in terms of this, but it's like the concept of being able to use this to, like even like notebook LM, like the notebook application, like to take better meeting notes, to use AI to help you take better, like it's more like, oh, that's something I need to do. This is something that is applicable to what I use applications for. I feel like that's a step in the right direction of getting more user adoption and the average user to better understand what's really going on without needing to know everything under the hood, right? Yeah, but I think Zara touched on what is basically common is that, you know, it's different now because AI is coming, as you said, do ahead, but a lot of times when something new happens, it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be AI, it could be anything. It's a matter of time and investment and it can be really hard to get a company to invest in it, especially if there's not an apparent connection. Like, yeah, if we were like, you know, if you work for a content hosting platform, the connection there was, Zara, for example, is really obvious, but if you, I don't know, work for a bank or work for, you know, an app, I am, what am I working on? Oh, that's different. You know, it can be really hard to just take any arbitrary app and figure out how to put AI into it in a way that justifies dev spending time learning and, you know, PM, whatever design time on it. So it, but as you said, I think eventually we welcome to a point where it's just table stakes, just like anything else. It's just, right now we're all playing the game, like, okay, when do I, when is the rubber gonna hit the road and we all have to do this thing and how are we gonna do it, so. And how do you stay ahead of it or at least not get knocked over by the wave of it, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because it's always a risk, yeah. You invest in something, if it doesn't work out, which, you know, let's be, let's insert jokes about Google here. I know, like, both Zara and I have like invested in SDKs that don't work out. That's like a thing. So, yeah, it's a thing. Sorry, Google, but it happens. STJs that don't work out. I like, it's like, it's like a relationship, right? It's like. It is, it is. I have to remove you now. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, thank you. You know, we had our time together, but I got to move on. It really is like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I feel like a good application off the top of my head would be just like UX studies, right? And like user behavior analysis. I feel like a good application of like AI and just predicting like what next feature could we make that out of like what users do would be a good investment to put our money in. That is really true. That is really true because there are a lot of smart people that look at a lot of numbers on it, on every team I've been on. But actually, hey, Google, are you listening? Like that's actually an API we could use is like. Free idea, engagement, AB tested, like AB tests, like all that stuff, like hidden, let's put the keywords in and let's see what pops out. But yeah. Just pass that along. There you go. Yeah. Down the idea factory. I hope you didn't just accidentally trigger everyone's Google Homes there. Wait. Oh my God. It inadvertently said the naughty word. All right. Well, so we'll keep an eye on Gemini as it or Jiminy as I like to say it as it continues, but it's definitely moving pretty fast. But for something not moving fast, Michelle, what do we got next? We have a report from the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners that shows that the percentage of new iPhone owners in the United States who came from Android has actually gone down in the year 2023. But the percentage difference is not that significant. In 2022, only 15% of new iPhone users came from Android. That number in 2023 dropped by 2%, which means that 13% of new iPhone users came from Android, which is still a lot of people. So quite a significant number of people jumping ship from Team Android to Team Apple. And the last time we saw that figure according to their analysis was 2019. And 2020 and 2021 were 11% of new iPhone users who came from Android, which were the better years for our side of the aisle. But it just shows that this trend is pretty steady. There's about 11% to 13% every year, it seems, about of iPhone users who are jumping ship and going on to the blue bubble side of things. And it makes me sad to see all the people jumping ship. But it makes me gotta wonder what is the reverse of this look like? What is the percentage of iOS people jumping ship to come over to Android? Because the number of Android users aren't going down, right? Like, there's gotta be like balance to the force, right? Like, for... Oh, well, I guess this was only in the United States. And we have seen like statistics that show that Android, I mean, iPhone is becoming more and more dominant in the US and especially in like Western countries. So the numbers probably don't look good if you look at them in a trend line for Android in Western countries. But overall still Android is dominant like throughout the world because of just how many Asia and that sort of stuff. So, well, interesting stuff enough. What's the topography like in Australia, Zara? Because we have a very US perspective from here and it's always, it's gonna be iPhone versus Android for a long time. Is it the same in Australia or is it different? Like... I think overall it's still, I mean, Australia is pretty. I think well off compared to like other countries in Asia Pacific. So there's still a lot of, there's a lot of iPhone users but I think from like the teams I've been in, it's usually 60-ish, 70-ish percent more iPhone users than Android users. And there's like a lot of Samsung's because they're really cheap. I remember, I think was it last week you were talking about cheap phones? Like here you can go to a supermarket and get like $50 phones, which is like what, 35 US? That's crazy. Yeah. So like, you know, if you just like, if you have someone who doesn't have a phone and wants a phone, they'll probably get like a $50 brand new Samsung phone than like $1,000 iPhone or something. Fascinating. Well, so Zara, what phone are you using for your daily driver? What phone do you use? Pixel 8. All right, so you're up and current. There it is. Very cool. All right, well, we love to keep an eye on numbers so that definitely got our attention. But now as the opportunity for our supporting patrons over on patreon.com slash android faithful where every week we put up some options of some potential news stories for us to talk about and the supporting patrons over at Patreon can vote on them and we started a new trend this week, by the way. Every week, the patron news pick is gonna have some sort of AI generated graphic of the bug droid reading the news. Several of you have already sent in your, we talked about this last week on the show. Several of you have already sent in your takes on it. Jason generated this one last week and sent it along. So it's our first one for our audio listeners. It's the, it's the android bug droid reading newspaper that says Google news with an enormous phone in front of him and like a cityscape background almost like he's a news reporter. But yeah, so having fun with AI turns out Microsoft co-pilot seems to be the best AI generator from using the Android for making the Android bug droid. Michelle, like since we've been discovering this being in co-pilot seem to be the leader in terms of generating a decent Android bug droid graphic, so there you go. So if you want to, if you want to get on the action if you want to generate your own bug droid you can email them to us at contact at androidfavel.com and we might use it on a future patron pick. But, so this week's patron pick, we have three stories for you all to choose from. The first one was that Bixby, Samsung Bixby now lets you launch key Galaxy AI features with just your voice. That came in last 15% of the vote. It had AI as a buzzword but Bixby, thumbs down on Bixby. The second story was the fact that the latest OnePlus 11 update is making cameras useless on OnePlus 11 devices. That came in second with 29%. And then the number one story, which is what I predicted would happen with 55% of the vote, the fall Unicode update will add eight emoji to our keyboard, keyboards which is important news of course to talk about emojis that is breaking news. This actually came out last week and got cut from the show last week so I was glad to see it get new life in the patron pick. But, so coming out in September 2024, we're gonna get new emojis including a face with bags under the eyes. A fingerprint, a leafless tree, a root vegetable, a harp, a shovel, an abstract splatter and a flag. So if you are looking for different ways to suggest that you are tired, you'll now have a happy face with bags under the eyes. Ironically, I was sending a message to my sister and I was looking through the emoji keyboard for a shovel and I was shocked that there was not a shovel emoji so I'm glad to see that's being added. I went with a broom instead of a shovel for that particular moment. But yes, the little thumbprint icon that looks like kind of like a thumbprint reader from an operating system that's there as is the splatter effect which I feel like will get used a lot. So what do we think, Group? Do we think these are good editions, lame editions? Michele, which one's your favorite? I like the new face left. The tired one. How are we old? Yeah, the tired. The tired. That's how I feel after digging through Android 15. Although, the chat room is wondering who lobbied for a harp which is true. I mean, all the harpists. John Henson and other harpists. Is harpist? I feel like there's like a really cool word for someone that plays a harp. Probably a harpinator, I don't know. That's what it should be. I do want to call out though that we have a certified emoji expert in the chat. Mike Evans, another one of our Android DevFam is a certified emoji expert. So it was good that it got cut this week. Let me bring it this week because then we can just be like, hey, emojis all up in our space. I do love the Unicode. I do love this as a process in terms of like, they get so many submissions. They have so many ideas of new emoji to add and this group has to decide which ones are going to make the cut. And like, that's just a fascinating process. And we talked about it a bunch over the years on our old show. And I'm glad to see that continuing. That tradition continuing on. And when we get the next version, I think it's Unicode Emoji 16.0 Alpha, which is open for early review now, but it's going to be released in September. So I'm glad to see that the emoji train keeps on rolling, which is good. Do you think you can like object? Speaking of the train keep on rolling, I do want to thank... Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was wondering if you could object to the emoji set. Well, that's the question is really, is that like, what are the internal fights amongst the emoji team and deciding what gets in, what doesn't get in, right? I would love to be the meeting notes taker in one of those meetings. Well, now you can use the harp as somebody in the chat rooms that don't harp on it, right? That's a good use of the harp emoji. There it is. That's a good term. So we also have clarification that a, from cousin of John in the chat, thank you very much that a person who plays a pedal harp is called a harpist. A person who plays the folk harp is called a harper and sometimes a harpist, but either may be called a harp player. So. Harper. Harper. Harper is a, I feel it's a different thing. Well, anyway, before we move on, I want to thank a couple of our patrons specifically for helping support the show. Robert Eves from the UK, Ian Smart and Clint Williams from North Carolina are just three of the many, many patrons over at patreon.com slash android faithful. And we thank everybody who supports us with that. And if you go sign up over there, you can get an ad free version of the podcast. You can get a t-shirt if you get the $20 level. You can get access to our exclusive discord. Fun stuff in there. So we've got even more cool stuff coming from patrons soon. So definitely get on board. We thank everybody for your support. So yeah, cool. All right. So that said, that's going to wrap up news and let's get into hardware because we got some leaks, don't we? That we do. We got some unexpected leaks thanks to sellers on eBay being naughty and selling things they shouldn't have access to. The first one is a prototype of the Pixel Fold. Well, it's not actually a Pixel Fold, but let's play in a second. Basically back in late 2021, 95 Google spotted a reference in the Android 12.0 code base to a device code named Jumbo Jack. At the time, it was assumed to be a prototype of the Pixel Fold hardware itself with the Galaxy Z Fold-like design. Fast forward to last week, this same device just mysteriously popped up in eBay, revealing itself to be a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 that Google had flashed with stock Android 12.0, presumably so they could test what the software experience would be like once they eventually got their hands on actual Pixel Fold prototype hardware. And basically what Google was doing was they were prototyping their eventual device using retail hardware from a competitor. And I know this sounds crazy, but it's probably not unusual and I'm pretty sure this happens maybe relatively often in the industry, but the thing we don't see often are retail units or units like this leaking out in the wild, especially on eBay. And the second leak that happened through eBay was some unfortunate Redditors got their hands on some underpowered Pixel Watch One units. So these Redditors were basically scammed into buying prototypes of the Pixel Watch with eight gigabytes of RAM and sorry, eight gigabytes of storage and one gigabyte of RAM. The retail Pixel Watch has 32 gigabytes of storage and two gigabytes of RAM. And this is obviously significantly underpowered compared to the retail model because if you only have eight gigs of storage, you don't have a lot of space to store music, to download a lot of apps. And if you have only a gig of RAM versus two gigs, you're gonna have some issues with switching between apps and keeping apps in memory and just generally not as much of a problem on smartwatches, but you're kind of cutting it close when you're dealing with one gigabyte of RAM on an Android device. So I'm glad Google didn't launch the device with those specs that were on the prototype units that the Redditors got their hands on. And I'm kind of curious like when did they decide to change it during the development process? Because it's quite a dramatic jump in performance. Yeah, and the fact that these found their ways out in the hands of people, I think is always, like I wanna know that story as well too. Yeah, there's like a Pixar movie in here or something about like a little prototype device that somehow escaped into the wild. I love that that's your, because like my thought is like, that's a great docuseries, like a documentary where like, you know, the reenactments and like all this sort of stuff. I don't know. Zara, what would you watch? Would you watch a documentary about this or a Pixar movie about this? I'd watch the Pixar movie. Yeah, that's all right, yeah, yeah. But then there should be a documentary of the behind the scenes. There you go, that's how you do it, yep. Of the Pixar movie. Dramatic recreations, it could have someone be like a Dave Burke impersonator, like have a very serious meeting about how the prototype's got leaked or something. Wouldn't it be funny if it was him? I bet Dave would do it. But you gotta imagine that the person selling it was unwitting, right? Like they somehow got their hands on a bunch of stuff and just threw it up there. Like I can't imagine the Googler with the jumbo jack with the pixel fold would, you know, knowingly sell it. Like they either threw it away or discarded it or somehow, you know what I mean? Like I can't imagine that the people selling those devices know what they have. That's my thought. I don't know. It would get you a really bad review on eBay. And so if you're a serious seller, that would be a ding. I imagine so, like yeah, maybe someone just finds it like unfortunately like at a restaurant or airport and then just like, okay, ooh, airport lost and found. I've always wondered about that. Like. Yeah, I mean, you never know where the stuff where people, I mean, people buy, I saw something on TikTok. Geez, I'm admitting I'm watching TikTok. But somebody on TikTok with a bought a bundle of unopened mail, that like people like packages, people got sent to the post office that never picked it up. And then the post office is just selling those packages. And it's like, what do you get? You know, it's like, oh, here's a T-shirt and here's like, whatever, you know? And like the fact that people abandoned storage units and then people pay, you know, like, you know, a storage picker is like, whatever that show is. That's a show. Yeah, that's a show. Right, like there's a whole undercurrent of like unclaimed goods that just get purchased blindly. And like, what do you get? And sometimes you hit gold and get a repurposed Samsung foldable. I'm pretty sure it happens in the US too. Because here, the airport had an auction on cars left in the parking lot. And there were some pretty nice cars. Yep. And like, how do you drive to the airport and just forget that you brought your car with you? I mean, sometimes you just need to get out and you just, you're not coming back, you know? Now that's like a mission impossible. You're like a BMW though. Yeah, of course. Well, no, no, I mean, like police auctions of impounded cars happens all the time too. Like that's the whole thing. Like when they, you know, like they, you know, so it's crazy. Does the BMW have rockets in an invisible mode? Because I'm just wondering if it's like maybe an MI6 car. Yeah, I know, but James Bond asked the Martin. Yeah, he's left it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, some non-leak news, some controlled release. Our friends over at OnePlus had a very cool announcement introducing the OnePlus Watch 2 with a great slogan, if you ask me, your partner in time, which I really enjoyed. So this is really interesting. And I also like, I was really impressed by the approach that they took in terms of this announcement where they said after a three-year hiatus and a reflective pause following the OnePlus Watch 1, we're returning to the smartwatch scene with the OnePlus Watch 2. So this is a bit of a teaser to the OnePlus Watch 2's official release or its grand entrance, as they call it, which is going to be happening at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 26th, which is a good reminder that Mobile World Congress is right around the corner. And I assume none of us are going, right? Michelle, you're not going, right? Unfortunately not. I need that hormone. Anyway, but so OnePlus is out of the gate strong with this. So despite this not even being officially released, they are applying their exact same approach with their flagship killer approach with phones to the watch. And they say here that they're aiming to win best flagship smartwatch of the year. And they're saying Watch 2 is going to be a bold statement of resurgence, boasting the best ever battery life and design that epitomizes both elegance and durability. And yeah, and so it's going to be really interesting to see what the full specs of this look like and what their flagship killer to ecosystem builder approach is going to be. As now they can pair this one, get it, pair, the OnePlus Watch 2 with the OnePlus 1, OnePlus 12 along with the OnePlus Buds Pro 2. OnePlus is building a nice little ecosystem here and it's all coming together. So we'll see what that looks like for Mobile World Congress. We're definitely with beta breadth and excited to try to get our hands on it hopefully. So we will see. Zara, do you partake in smartwatches? Do you wear a smartwatch? I got the OG Pixel watch from, I think it was Google gave it away at one conference I went to. And it was pretty horrible that time when it was first released. I gotta be honest, I wore it walking around Europe and it's just like dead, like at the end of the day. It was horrible, but now it's much better. Like the battery lasts like much longer. I did spend quite a bit of time configuring my home screen as you do, those things deserve the time to tweak and do all those sorts of things. But yeah, I like it. Especially after the improvements that they did to it. I skipped the Pixel 2 because it started working better. So, yeah, I like it. Cool. Well, we'll see what OnePlus brings to the smartwatch table, that's for sure. But we got even more stuff coming out, right, Wen? Yeah, I got a whole bunch of stuff. We just know, for example, that Asus is going to release the Zenfone 11 Ultra, or at least announce it or announce something unveiling. There we go. The Zenfone 11 Ultra on March 14th. There's not a lot. There is a teaser page at asus.com slash event slash Zenfone. They are going to have some kind of announcement event on March 14th with Taipei, Berlin, and New York with it as country. So just give you an idea, just a very general idea of the possible markets that this will be available in. And I really like the expand your vision, like motto that they are kind of attaching to this event because it kind of has like multiple meanings because it is an ultra in the tradition of ultras. It is presumably a big phone. It's a little hard to tell like the photos that they have on the site are not forthcoming about actual dimensions, but it does claim an ultra size. But then of course, what is a phone, a flagship phone these days without some AI? So not only do you get a bigger experience, get to expand your vision. It does seem to kind of like give hints that video and photo features, which these days, you can't have a photo video feature without having some kind of AI that kind of augments those medias. And then of course, maybe expanding your vision because you have a longer lasting battery, which is one of the other things they claim that you'll just be able to look at it longer. We'll see. But anyway, we'll have to wait until March 14th to see more, but that's not all. If you wanted a little more, I mean, we talked about BMWs, but if you're more of a Porsche fan than Honor has you covered because the Honor Magic V2 is coming out with a very Porsche-fied version. And I'm not really a Porsche fan myself, but if you are a Porsche fan, look for the special edition Magic V2 RSR. RSR stands for, and I'm sorry, German speaking folks, the Rennsport Rennwagen, which is German for racing sport, racing car, I think. Sorry, someone who definitely knows German, correct me. But basically, it's kind of a zhuzhed up version. The internals are basically the same, but it has kind of like the lines and the color and the styling of a Porsche. I think the Flyline, which is like a kind of like a ridge running down the back of it is meant to evoke the 911 hood. And yeah, you kind of get some other goodies, like an active stylus, a spare 66 watt charger and a special fancy stitched case and dark gray vegan leather to go with it. If you are looking to pick this up, please be aware that, you know, while the RSR is currently retailing for 16,000 yuan in China, it was about 2,200 USD. Traditionally, the differentials in price between the Chinese market and the international markets is huge. For example, there's like a 700 USD difference between the Magic V2 in the Chinese market versus international market. So I don't know, it's gonna be expensive, y'all, but I guess if you're a Porsche fan, that might, maybe you just fall in a demographic where that's cool. But if you like Porsches, look out for the Honor V2 RSR. Call me crazy. I know you guys weren't too wowed by this, but I actually like the design. I don't think it's that... It is cute, it's sexy. Like yeah, the camera bump is a little trapezoidal. It actually has a titanium frame. So it is sexy. Like in comparison to the regular Honor, like I kind of liked how they did the camera bump, the angle to it and all that sort of stuff, but yeah, I don't know if I spent all the money on it just to have Porsche. Like I don't like the Porsche aspect of it, but every time I see this phone, it's dang, it's thin. Like this is like, this truly is the thinnest foldable. 9.9 millimeters close. And it's still that thin, it's still the thinnest one. And I don't know, maybe if you throw the phone by accident, the Porsche one would just go really fast because of the streamline. Not that you would throw it. But I don't know if like James Bond had to throw it as like a weapon or something. But yeah, it'd been a super expensive phone is not your jam, which we have plenty of mid range and kind of cheap phone fans on the show. And you're looking for a flip a bowl and you happen to be in Japan, there might be a phone out there for you. There was recently an announcement on Yahoo in Japan. The ZTE Libero Flip is a new kind of very Galaxy Z. It's almost like though, it's like the Techno Phantom Flip plus a Galaxy Z Flip. So it is a clamshell style foldable. It looks like a Techno Phantom Flip in that the cover screen is not a rectangular cover screen like a lot of the ones that we have here available in the US. It's a circular dial that has all kinds of widgets, but it has that kind of like Samsung flip flavor with a lot of like really interesting software that goes with the cover screen, including, you know, special gestures to allow you to take cool selfies in the front. Of course, the commensurate, you know, Asian peace sign or selfies with a cat. And the really interesting thing about this is that, you know, we keep talking about how a lot of the most successful foldable foldables and flipables are just not cheap, but the ZTE Libero Flip is actually foreign for 20 USD unless you pre-order it. And then it's 265 USD. So dang y'all, I know we have listeners in Japan. So I don't know, comment, questions, like what do you think? What's the flippable market like in Japan? And is this like going to be a great contender? And hopefully just in general, a kind of harbinger of cheaper flipables to come. So anyway. I like cheaper flipables or foldables being an option. And I do like that circular screen. I do too, yeah. And then the software is important too, because part of it is selling the flip, the kind of transformative enough of it with software. And yes, Pac Northwest, Fallstar, always audience member friend. I am going to try to look for one, but I don't know what buying phones in Japan is like. I tried last time casually, but I'll try harder this time when I go to March. How do you casually try to buy a phone? Or just like, oh, hey phone. You just walked out of the house, do you want me to buy you? Whatever, see you later. Walk down the nerd store. And if there's not a gotcha machine that gets my attention, then I'll kind of walk over to the electronic section and see if I have money to spend. That's kind of just casual. But yeah, more flippables, more foldables. So Zara, what is the flippable foldable penetration in Australia like? Are you seeing foldables in the wild or? Not really in the wild. More like if I go to like developer centric events, that's where I see a lot more flippables. But this one looks pretty cool. I think it's a good entry-level flippable phone. If you want to explore that kind of hardware, it's cheap enough to warrant like, well, if the hinge breaks, because that's always my issue. Like if the hinge breaks, I mean, it's not that expensive, I guess. Yeah, that is a note though, that it's only IPX42, so it's not really dustproof for waterproof. So that's a good point. It probably will break. Yeah. I guess they sub $500 though for a flippable. That's a sweet spot. And sub 300, if you pre-order, which is not a big ask honestly, and not a heavy lift. If we can get foldables down sub 1,000, then we're, you know, I think the whole form factor becomes much more accessible to people. All right, well, that's ZTE and honor and ASUS are not to be left behind. There's some other players out there, right, Michelle? Yeah, that's right, Ron. And the complete opposite side of the price spectrum from the ZTE flip we just talked about is the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, which Xiaomi has been teasing recently and which leakers have been revealing details of. So Xiaomi's gearing up to launch the Xiaomi 14 series, the regular models in Europe. They're planning to talk about it next week in the Mobile World Congress after they launched it in China late last year. And alongside the announcement of the 14 series in Europe, they're also going to add a new Ultra model to the lineup. We did have previous Ultra models in the Xiaomi 12 and the Xiaomi 13 lineup. But of course, like this year, they're gonna add a Xiaomi 14 Ultra model. And according to the German blog Win Future, it's gonna have a 6.73 inch OLED screen at QHD resolution with a 120 or three first rate and up to 3,000 nits of brightness, which is wild. It'll be powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with up to 16 gigs of LPDDR5X RAM and up to a terabyte of storage. A huge 5,300 milliamp hour battery with incredibly vast 90 watt wire charging, 50 watt wireless charging. It'll have an IP68 rating. And according to Xiaomi CEO, Leijun, it'll have a Leica co-branded dual telephoto lens featuring a 75 millimeter floating and a 120 millimeter periscope lens, both with Sony's 50 megapixel IMX 858 image sensor. So there's a lot of specs just on around, but from what I heard, people who use the Xiaomi 13 Ultra, they've had been praising it as probably the best camera phone of 2023. So the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is likely to be a contender for best camera phone of 2024 if Xiaomi's able to keep up that level of quality. However, at a rumored price of 1499 euros, it's gonna be really expensive and price out of reach for most people. Yep. And Leijun also hits a Twitter, right, with the important question, right? What does it look like? Yes. And what team are you? Are you team white or team black? In terms of the colors of the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, you know? And I gotta admit, the- They both look pretty good. They both look very nice. Although, white is winning the poll on Twitter with 58.6%. So. I do think white looks slightly better. In these photos, the white one looks dang sexy. I mean, like that looks like a super nice phone that stands out. And it looks like a high quality camera phone. Right? The size of that bump. I mean, the Leica bump is just dang. I feel like all of our Leica- Leica-like in friends are gonna like this phone. Sorry. Oh, wow, there was levels to that. I didn't intend that, y'all. I'm sorry. I'm gonna shut up now. That was fantastic, by the way. That was- I didn't, that last one, I really didn't mean it. I swear to God. Leica friends, I swear to God, Leica. Oh, that got me. Oh, man. All right. It's kind of hard to transition from that. But while we're talking about foldables, we do wanna share, even though Jason is off this week and he is out on vacation, which we are all very jealous of, he did recently post to his YouTube channel his first review of the OnePlus Open, his first hardware review on his independent channel. And we wanted to share a little bit of it with y'all. And so if you don't mind, we can roll the beginning of it and we can check it out. Here we go. The foldable trend is in full force and pretty much since the beginning, Samsung has been leading the pack. And while that hasn't changed, OnePlus obviously has plans to challenge that fact. After a few weeks with the OnePlus Open, I gotta say, they're onto something. While I may be a little late to the game with the OnePlus Open, I heard enough people anoint the Open as phone of the year for 2023, so I knew I had to give it a spin. I've spent a good deal of time with many of the foldables of years past, so I wanted to see what is so special about the Open. The hardware itself is breathtaking. After experiencing the thin and narrow front display on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold series, not to mention its chunky brick-like quality in the pocket, the OnePlus Open is a refreshing change of pace. Not only does it feel lighter and definitely more spelt, which helps when it's stowed away in the pocket, the front of the device actually looks like a pretty standard smartphone display, which is to say it doesn't make any trade-offs the way other foldables have. You get what you expect out of the standard candy bar phone and it happens to fold out into a nice tablet-style device, the best of both worlds. Now, the common complaint of visible creases on the inside display of other foldables is, at least here, mostly a non-issue. Is there a fold crease to be spotted? Yes, there is, but it's incredibly muted by comparison with others that I've seen anyways. I believe it's helped by the fact that the display itself doesn't exhibit the same kind of squishy quality that some competitors have shown. That seems to elevate the perception that this is a higher-quality display. And all this says nothing about the sharpness of the display itself, an LTPO panel that's 2800 nits bright and easy on the eyes and the sunlight. Now, design-wise, OnePlus really nailed the hinge. It's beautiful, slick, and fluid. Some competing foldables have hinges that are too stiff to easily open, which usually has me concerned I might actually drop the device while trying to get to the inside. But that same rigidness then comes in handy for propping the device open to varying degrees. The OnePlus Open needs around 45 degrees to keep from snapping shut. All right, well, thank you, Jason. That's just a taste of Jason's first hardware review. But you can definitely go watch the rest of it. And that is available on the Yellow Gold Studios YouTube channel. Go to youtube.com slash Yellow Gold Studios. Give Jason a like and a subscribe. Even though he's not on the show this week, he did a great job on that OnePlus Open review. And definitely recommend everybody go and check that out. A little late to the game, but he's catching up. He had a couple of months of being on the fence. But I gotta say, I seeing the OnePlus Open in his setup made me very jealous that I don't have the OnePlus Open in my hands right now. It looked very, very attractive. Jason, get back now. Yeah. Convince. Exactly. So yeah, so good stuff. So go subscribe to Jason's YouTube channel. And we miss you, Jason. Come back next week. Right. So that said, we're gonna move on into apps. All right. Yeah. And I know y'all will never get tired of Google messages stories. So we have another one for you. But this one's actually pretty, I mean, if you are less Google messages, you know, liking kind of person, you might be interested in this feature though. Cause I think it's like a, definitely a table stakes feature in 2024. And that story that I'm, that feature that I'm talking about is being able to edit text or edit messages after you send them. So they are working on this. It does seem to be feature flagged for now, but it seems to be in the works. And of course, you know, all of our, you know, very prodigious APK poking at friends did find that there is going to be a feature where you can long press on a message, have an edit icon appear. And if that message was sent within the last 30 minutes, be able to send it. This will include edit history, of course, so that's super important transparency with your message editing. But yeah, for now it's hidden behind a feature flag, but yeah, I think some people have been able to enable it, but if the other person that you're communicating with hasn't enabled it, it gets a little funny. And the kind of fallback experience for this edited messages is just getting every version of the message sent. So I guess if you're one of those people who like to poke and enable things, use with caution, especially if you're talking to someone who isn't enabling it, they might just get a whole bunch of gradually edited messages, which is not a hidden way. That's the challenge here, because like editing a message on Slack or Discord or stuff like that will work, or even WhatsApps roll out of message editing, it's comfortable because you're both on the same platform and you see how it works. But with Google Messages, you might not be talking to someone on RCS to that point, and then it can get Clujie, right? But it's funny to show the concept of not being able to edit your message, looking at you, X Twitter, Twix, in 2024 is just like, it's baffling to think that like, oh, they're messaging platforms that I can't edit the message on. Like I feel like that's like, like you said, it's gotta be table stakes in messaging. Absolutely, at this time. So I guess we'll just wait and see when we all get it on Messages, if you're using Messages or you just use WhatsApp or the other platforms, if I mentioned platforms. So there you go. Plus one on WhatsApp. Plus one. And then one more thing from Google in terms of Messages is Message Summaries, yet another AI story this week. So it was really interesting because during Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, of course, we did find there was a lot of Google in our Samsung announcements. And one of those things that was announced was Android Auto Message Summaries in the middle of your Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. But we have a little bit more of an idea of how they might work and some details. Something that is interesting is not necessarily that, you know, Android Auto is going to basically take, you know, multiple messages from the same center and group and be able to kind of summarize them and then go ahead and like read that to you instead of having Messages read one by one by one, paying, read the message, paying me the message, which is my experience right now. And my husband and I try to talk about what's for lunch on my way home from my appointments. You'll get just like kind of like a nice AI generated summary. So that is interesting. There's also something interesting around the messaging, I think, which is what nine to five Google kind of, I think pointed out is that there's an interesting story here of like the branding and the direction and kind of Google trying to clean up their kind of, you know, ecosystem of assistant things while not calling it assistant, maybe calling it Gemini, maybe assistant still, but it's really just Android Auto. Just this kind of confusion. So during Samsung Galaxy Impact, it was branded as just Android Auto, but in case it's not clear, it's still an assistant feature. And according to the documentation and the support notes, this is an Android Auto kind of like, you know, noted feature, but it does say that it should be enabled on your quote assistant enabled Android device. So, you know, I think we talked about assistant coming to like the new versions of assistant coming to headphones and stuff or get Gemini rather coming to a headphones. So yeah, look out for that as well. There is a setting currently in Android Auto to enable this message summaries. If you go to your Android Auto HUD, go into settings, there is a play AI messages summaries, you know, toggle that you can toggle on, although the nine to five Google team haven't actually seen the summaries come in. But yeah, if you do, if you have Android Auto, like SNS to be crew, or just otherwise have Android Auto, you have enabled this, let us know whenever you see the message summaries pop up and let us know if they're helpful. I love that the definition of what it will summarize is one long message or multiple messages from the same sender or the group. Yeah, so one long message is 40 words or more or more than 40 words rather, so. This is horrifying. Yeah, it does claim, there was a section on privacy claim that they don't, you know, hold on to logs. They don't work, you know, they don't keep your chats and they don't log. Oh, I don't think it's horrifying about the privacy or the logging aspect. I think it's horrifying about the context of like, can AI understand the nonsense that me and my friends talk amongst each other? That is fair, that is very fair. I wonder that sometimes myself. But also, I talk to my friends and sometimes we talk about two things, like alternately, it happens all the time with all of my friends. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I've got a text chain with two of my buddies where we're talking about baseball and movies at the same time and they get intertwined all the time and it can be the kind of thing. But you somehow know which message is for which topic, but it's also funny because like the example, you know, in the article 9.5 Google that we're showing and the example that Google provided was like someone named Brianna is texting someone about dinner and the summary is like, Brianna wants to know if you want Thai and if you're going to make it on time. I want to know what the original messages look like is Brianna just really long-winded and it's like, Brianna's like, well, you know, it's kind of getting hungry and I'm starving. You know, we had sushi last week, but maybe we should try fried. All the fun, it's fine. But it's funny if like you also then worked in like, you know, messages about the new dude moving coming out as like, oh, don't the sand, the sandworms? Is that sandworms? Does the sandworms look amazing? And the summary is like, hey, Brianna wants Thai sandworms for dinner or something. Yeah, does it do that? Does it just like munch everything together and you're just like, what? Yep. We'll see. Very strange, very strange, but we'll see indeed. So another thing coming from Google, it's interesting to see pixel specific functionality start to get rolled out to other users and in the process kind of get rebranded. So for example, Google's search labs is testing a function that they call talk to a live representative which will basically place a call for you, wait on hold and then give you the call once a live representative is available. And this is available for calling things like airlines is a couple of, you know, participating airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit, although is there anybody at Spirit that you can talk to? But also, you know, some telecommunications company like Boost Mobile and Cricket and Samsung and Sprint, retailers like Best Buy and Home Depot and Walmart, Insurance like E-Surance and State Farm. And this is essentially the hold for me pixel thing where you would call someone and then put and then say, let me know, like put, you know, be on hold for me and let me know when there's someone to talk to. It's got some little tweaks to it. It's not exactly how hold for me works. It's a little bit of a, it's not exactly a one to one of hold for me with assistant, but it definitely seems like the evolution of it. And I guess it would make sense why they would roll this out more specifically within the search labs, but to wider users. So yeah, I mean, I like when everyone getting cool functionality. It makes Android kind of cool. So yeah, there's that. And then what else we got, Michelle? We got one last one. That's right, Ron. And we've been talking a lot about AI this episode and to cap it all off, Google seems to be using AI to generate app highlights and frequently asked questions on the Play Store. So a couple of users have noticed while they were looking at app listings on Google Play that there's this new AI generated app highlights section that like basically summarizes some of the key features of an application. You can see some of the screenshots here if you're watching the video feed of the app highlights section for like VK, YouTube music, Nike, and like basically listing some key features of the app, I guess based on what the developer provides in the app description, or maybe based on like past updates or change logs. I'm not exactly sure, because Google hasn't announced this feature yet. It's just quietly rolled out to some users. And another thing they've also rolled out, as I mentioned, is in addition of a frequently asked question section that basically looks through all the reviews, I'm assuming, and then pulls together a list of some questions that people might be asking frequently about this application and then preemptively answers it based on what it knows about the application, the description, the category of the app and what people have said about it. And these are potentially useful features just for getting a quick glance at an application, like what an application is about, because there's so many things that developers have to do when it comes to marketing their own app and like even like the little tiny things that AI can help out with could go a long way into reducing the volume of user support requests and tickets that you get. Yeah, I do like the fact that they're disclosing at the bottom of the box is created by AI, right, like the responsible use of AI and letting people know that it's there. Yeah. But a good question in the chat, which is from our folks who are watching our live stream, can a developer object to Google's chosen summary, which is an interesting question because if I'm a developer and the AI has gleaned some sort of question and answer for my app that is not accurate, can I correct that? So that's something to think about as well, the responsibility of doing this. Kind of makes sense to me, because I mean a little behind the scenes, but a lot of the kind of this part of management and bookkeeping with apps is all done in the Google Play Console and the Google Play Console, I don't know, Zara has her experience with the Google Play Console because it just seems like a really big mess of confusing things that engineers barely understand and haven't helped any product people that try to go in there. So I can see the value in this in that it's one less thing for us to manage, but also, yes, it's AI-ed. So Zara, is Winn correct is the Google Play Console challenging for you? Yes. So it's kind of weird because a lot of the things on the Google Play Console is for developers, but it's also mixed in with stuff that usually business people would care about, like your Play Store listing or app description, all those things, and they're all kind of intertwined together and all the permission levels, it's not really very clear, you can either have all of it, some of it, but the sum of it, you might need like, it narrows you down to something, like it's really difficult to set roles basically. So I will give the experience as the business marketing guy, it is confusing as AF, right? And it is like trying to find stuff in that, like if you think about things that like, it'd be nice to see a Google IO and announce with that they're revamping something. I think the Google Play Console is definitely like due for some love there because it's a little bit of internal shame that I'm like, oh, I don't have the dev chops, like clearly developers know how to navigate around this, so I'm kind of glad to hear that you both are having the same challenges. No, yeah, and it's always like, whose turn is it or whose responsibility is it to change this thing or look at this thing or who is gonna look at the bug report or the this report that says, oh, you guys have done some bad things, it's really, it's awful. It's such an important tool. It's just hitting me how really, I really could use some love. Hopefully the AI helps and doesn't hurt. Well, we'll see, so definitely, so if you're a developer and you see the AI summarizing your app incorrectly, write in, let us know, we'll help spread the word. Let us know how much you like the summary. Yeah, if they're accurate or not. But yeah, but again, I think this is cool. This is again, Google applying dog food and their own stuff using AI to do it, so. Totally. All right, well, let's go to wrap it up for apps. And we got a couple of emails from folks. You can always email us at contactantandroidfaithful.com. We love to hear from you all as you respond to the nonsense we talk about every week and share your little insights and that such. And when you've got the first email, we've got a topic near and dear to your heart. Oh yes, and I really enjoy this email from Tom who is giving us a lovely, I always love app recommendations from our Android faithful fam and here's another one from Tom. Hi AF, in the past I've heard you discussing how you share files from your Android device to your computer. I've done similar things that you described, adding attachments to draft emails or Slack messages on my phone, then opening those on my computer. Yes, very much so, Tom. Recently I came across a utility called neardrop for macOS, brilliant name that partially implements Google's nearby share protocol and allows easy sharing from Android devices to macOS. It works really well and I regularly use this now as it's more convenient than emailing or slacking my files to myself. I thought you and the AF audience might be interested to know about it. Cheers, Tom, from Ireland, living in Glasgow, Scotland. Number one, the name is amazing, airdrop, nearby share, although I guess now it might, do we need to call it quick drop now or air share? Quick share, whatever you say. To be fair, the underlying protocol is still called nearby. They haven't rebranded that. Fair enough. But yeah, we also, if you are on the live stream or if you wanna just go check out this project, it's open source on GitHub under grishka slash neardrop. And I'm absolutely gonna try this because yes, I am that person that DMs myself, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, so the user on GitHub is G-R-I-S-H-K-A Grishka. So it's github.com slash grishka slash neardrop. And it's all open source, all the files are there in GitHub. If you're into it, it explains how it works, how to install it. It's a little, it's a little challenging to install. You gotta be comfortable with the command line and all things like that. And Grishka, the author actually goes on, he has a great FAQ on there and also explains that why it's not in the Mac App Store because he doesn't believe in giving Apple any money or, he says, because I don't wanna pay Apple $99 a year for the privilege of developing Mac OS apps. I also don't wanna have to go through the review process. Just a quick correction. You don't have to install, do new command line things, install. You can just go to the releases tab and download it. Okay, okay, yeah, I saw installation and then you wanna, yeah, so, okay, cool. All right, great, yeah, so it's easy to install then. Okay, good, excellent. So I'm definitely gonna check this out because I'm the one who said that I was slacking myself files and I'm on a Mac. So that's definitely a handy tool for sure. So thanks, Tom, for sharing that with us. All right, next email is yours, Michelle. So this email is coming in from, sorry, I don't see the name. Adam in San Diego who wrote in to say, I wanted to share this tip for anyone else with a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S24 series. I may be having this issue I had. So I've had Samsung Galaxy phones for years and just got my S24 and it's been driving me crazy that I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to change the notification sounds in each app like I've been able to on every previous phone. I was even looking at my S23 next to my S24 trying to figure out why my S24 was different. I was searching Google community and read it and couldn't find the answer anywhere. Everything just kept pointing to settings, apps, pick the app, choose whatever notification sound you want and I'm screaming to myself, but it won't let me. Until I found this video. The TLDR is that, of course, Samsung added a hidden setting in one UI 6.1 that you have to toggle before you can set notification sounds for each app frowning face. Until or unless you toggle this one hard to find button, every app will only use a default Samsung notification sound and you cannot change them. Hope it helps all those in the same boat I was until today. I have no affiliation with this YouTuber, just a video I came across that solved my problem. Thanks, Adam San Diego. Yes, and this is a video from Jeff Springer on YouTube who goes into detail on how to fix this in the settings on a Samsung Galaxy, et cetera. And so this was the helpful video that was shared by Adam. YouTuber Jeff Springer, the video is Galaxy S24, S24 Ultra, how to set different notification sound for each separate app if you wanna go find it. And we'll include a link to this in the show notes so you guys can track it down that way. Basically, for some reason, Samsung decided to turn off Android notification channels feature entirely by default. This is, I've never seen anyone else do that. Like you have to go in manually to settings and turn it on so you can get just this basic Android feature enabled. And because you don't have access to Android notification channels, you can't customize it for specific contacts or specific things on a per app basis. Wild. Why do they make those decisions? I don't know. I see all people asking all the time, like, where is this setting? How do I change it? Well, that's the kind of thing where you gotta listen to your users, right? Like clearly this setting is an obstacle and hopefully Samsung listens to that and makes the adjustment or whatever it might be. Very confusing. So anyway, all right. Well, thank you everybody for writing in. Email us at contact.androidfateful.com. We love to hear from you. And thank you, Zara, for joining us. You are awesome from tomorrow, from the world of the future. So tell us, Zara, if people like what you do, tell them where they can find you on the internet. So all the links to all the things are in my blog, Zara.dev. I want the .dev domain open. I like within five minutes tried to claim my name. But it looks like I'm the only Zara who's a developer anyway. But yeah, all the links are there. I'm not on Twitter as much anymore as I used to. But I'm definitely on Macedon and Thread. So bring me there. Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us for sure. We loved having your perspective. So great. Thanks for having me. This has been really fun. I'll see you in the future later, tomorrow. It's gonna be weird because you're gonna listen or watch this in the past but you were in the future and it all, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That always, I always should. We should tell people Ron how many emails we sent trying to figure out the time zones for this. Probably far more than there was probably a much easier way to do it, but hey, it's so fun. The thing that always gets me out of people in Australia and what got me about living in the future was if you're watching the movie GFK by Oliver Stone, the early 90s movie with Kevin Costner about the Kennedy assassination, there's a segment in it with Donald Sutherland who is like an anonymous source within the government talking to Kevin Costner's character about the Kennedy assassination. And he said that he was on assignment in Australia and read about the assassination of Kennedy in the paper but it hadn't happened yet because he was in Australia in the next day. And so like, I remember watching that as a teenager and like my mind being blown and it was like, oh, time zones, that's crazy. And so I always appreciate people in Australia for living in the future. So. Trailblazing for you. Yeah, exactly, we appreciate it. All right, cool, well, Michelle, why don't we tell folks where we can find all your Android coverage? If you wanna keep up with what's new in Android, see what's coming to Android 15, you can follow me on Twix, Macedon, Threads, Reddit, Discord, et cetera, at MichelleRoman. And if you wanna support my work, join my Discord community, see what I'm working on ahead of time. You can go to patreon.com slash MichelleRoman. You could subscribe for as low as $3 a month and get access to the Discord, which is very lively. And yeah, we talk a lot about Android and Pixel and Google stuff on there. So join us if you wanna share in the nerdiness. Right on, excellent, love the nerdiness. Thank you, Michelle. Wynn, how about you? Hey, I'm also an Android dev. I don't do as many cool things as Zara but I occasionally do do a couple things and you can find my talks associated code and video on my website, randomlytyping.com. And I am at Queen Code Monkey at places. I really am not on Twix. I know I'm there and I know I've got a lot of great people following me but just don't expect a lot there. But if you do wanna catch up with me, I'm over at Instagram mostly. So yeah. Cool, excellent. And I am on social media at RonExo on all the various platforms, not as active as I would like to be but life gets in the way. But if you're looking for more stuff to listen to and you like movies, head over to ifanboy.com where last week we released our latest media-spload episode where we discussed not only what we've been watching, I've been watching a bunch of cool TV shows like Mr. Spade and Slow Horses and Feud, Capote vs. the Swans. But we also analyzed the Oscar best picture nominations and discussed the movies of 2023 and our favorite ones. So head over to ifanboy.com, you can listen to it. Good fun conversation, me and the guys over there. But in the meantime, wanna thank everyone for listening to the show and for being awesome. Reminder, you can email us at contact at androidfaithful.com, we love to hear from you. Head over to patreon.com slash androidfaithful to show your support and get in on all the good stuff that we provide for you supporters. And of course you can find everything you need over at androidfaithful.com that's got links to all the different podcast platforms and things like that where you can listen to the show. We live stream the show every Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific on youtube.com slash DTNN or Daily Tech News Show and twitch.tv slash good day internet. Thanks to our good friends at Daily Tech News Show. We love to be a part of the team. We love Android, we love talking about it. Jason will be back next week. The show will be much smoother, I promise. And until next time, we'll see you then cause we are Android Faithful.