 Hey, fam, this is Android Faithful, your weekly source for the latest news, hardware and apps in the world of Android, through snow, through summer, through the moon, passing between the sun and the earth, in either a partial or total eclipse, we are here to bring you the Android news. I am back and I'm going to it now. And I'm Jason Howell. Save the cheerleaders, save the world. And I'm Michelle Ramon. Sorry, isn't that the, that's the heroes. That's heroes, yeah, that's heroes. That was a great reference. And that had something to do with the eclipse. I forgot about that show until yesterday, when suddenly I saw Save the Cheerleader, Save the World and other like heroes clips and everything. I was like, well, you know what? The first season of that show was pretty darn good. So, you know, at least there's that to remember from the solar eclipse. I didn't actually watch much of that show. I just know it from cultural osmosis. So. OK. Yeah, I would say from my own experience, the first season was excellent. And then everything that came after that was pretty disappointing by comparison. So there you go. There's my 10 second review. Well, I well, it appears from cultural osmosis from my culture, osmosis learning that the solar that the solar eclipse, especially a total one, brings amazing things. And we have one of an amazing thing, our amazing person on this show for the first time to the show, to Andrew Faithful, please welcome nine to five Googles, Ben Shun. Hey, Ben, thank you for having me. Oh, that was a really good applause noise, Jason. Thank you. That was in the words that was like that. It's it's weird that I practice things like that, but I do. Hi, Ben. Hi. Great to see you, man. Good to have you here. We've had you as the guest a number of times on all about Android. But of course, this is a different show entirely, you know, it's kind of the same and kind of different. So it's good to have you back. Thank you for being on tonight. Thank you for having me on. Absolutely. Well, oh, sorry. And our listeners can't see, but a lot of our rundown is dominated by Ben here, who is a prolific writer, very prolific writer. Yeah, no kidding. What is what? OK, so let's let's take a moment to reflect on this. What is your most prolific week? Like I imagine there's like a writer on a site like nine to five Google where there is constantly news and you're constantly writing articles to kind of keep up with the news. You probably have some sense of like the week from hell or from heaven, depending on how you look at it. Is there a week to where you were like, there's that that like pinnacle week that I wrote 50 articles? Oh, so so my record for a day is 38. Are you kidding me? Day, which is Google I.O. Oh, right. That makes a lot of sense. How many of those were pre-drafted versus like written on the day of because 38 is insane. That was nine a.m. to one in the morning. Oh, my God. Yeah, no, no. Google I.O. is the busiest of the days. I would say pixel launch at the end here is the busiest week. Dang. Wow, that's impressive. Impressive that you can come up with that many articles and have them all say different things and not repeat yourself along the way. That would be my problem. I'd start. I wouldn't realize that I already said that in a different article and people would yell at me for it. Anyways, I'm super impressed. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really excited. Half the time when I'm doing show prep, it's like between between you, Ben and Michelle. It's like, OK, now what's Ben got to say? Yeah, right. I was going to say what's Ben going to say? What's Michelle going to say? And also, Abner over at 9 to 5 Google to just like, I feel like. Oh, absolutely. Without deciding to like parasocial or relationship, it's just like, you know, like you guys are like my buddies when I'm doing prep for the show. It's so nice. So I actually was really excited to actually be back in time to have my first show with you, Ben. So this is this is really cool. I'm excited to be on with you as well. Well, it's hard for audio stream listeners to see, but I wish you could hear some some way. The fabulous shirt game that most of us, sorry, Jason, have been has an excellent shirt on as well. Very Android themed specific at the Android astronaut. Michelle and Michelle and I are a little bit more on brand because we are wearing the new Android faithful merch. That's right. We have merch now. We have a threadless store where you can get t-shirts. And not just like, like the usual t-shirts. We got like v-necks and crew necks and long sleep t-shirts. We got jackets. We got, did y'all know we have rugs as well? We got tanks. We got, we got everything y'all. So if you want to get your hands on the Android faithful frequency t-shirt, head over to, what's the URL Jason? My tired eyes connect. It is threadless. Hold on. I'm trying to find the thing. And there we go. .threadless.com. Thank you. .threadless.com. There we go. Android faithful. .threadless.com. And get you an Android faithful frequency t-shirt. Ron has been really sweet to say that I designed it. That's only very partially true. It's based on our logo. But I also like to say that Jason partly designed it because it is the frequency waveform from our wonderful theme song. And actually, I think it's probably one of like, you know, that really, you know, kick ass, like dance, you know, like, you know, beat. I'm pretty sure that on the left side is like one of the little. That left side is a kick drum. Yeah, it is. It probably is because it was the most interesting part of the waveform. So anyway, if you want a little piece of us on you or on your floor, if you get a rug, head on over to android faithful.threadless.com. And yes, we have no Ron today, but our own Ron Richards. If you miss him and you want to like catch up with him, he was actually on this channel, on the stream earlier today on the Daily Tech News Show talking about Android stuff. Maybe a few things we'll be talking about later. So yeah, if you miss you some Ron and especially if you haven't checked out Daily Tech News Show, who was our lovely, you know, host network, go check him out on YouTube or on Twitch or on your favorite pod catcher. And he was talking about something on that show, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, but not quite yet. The find my device network, which has become a very recurring theme on the show. Before we get to that, though, let's talk about the most important news I think, which is that yesterday there was an eclipse. And what does that even have to do with Android? Well, I noticed partially because I participated and so did you, Ben and so did you, Michelle and everyone else that had a phone attempted to take a photo of the eclipse wherever they happened to be. And, you know, I saw some actually some pretty darn good shots. And actually, Michelle, you took some of these shots from using your S24 Ultra. And I'll just kind of thumb through these, but yeah, you got some, I mean, that's pretty sick right there. If you're watching the video version, you can see these. Yeah, the clouds make it look a little ominous. I really like that shot in particular. Yeah. And was this just with the pro mode setting or how did you do these? No, this is just straight off. There's the regular camera mode, handheld, no stabilizer or gimbal is very challenging because, you know, when you're at 100 X zoom in particular, any little movement will like move the sun out of frame. So like I had to spend a lot of time getting it perfect. And yeah, I wish I had a proper tripod set up, but like I was kind of worried with my MacGyver set up initially. Like I was worried my phone would fall out of the little tripod that I had. So I didn't want to risk it. So I just tried it all handheld, it turned out pretty okay. Like there's a lot of photos. I saw some really professional photos that were way better, but like out of all the smartphone cameras photos that I saw, seems like people were most impressed by those taken by the S24 Ultra. And, you know, I think that kind of goes to show that the zoom telephoto lens they pack in this phone is really impressive. I can't speak for all the other camera aspects, you know, people still note that the shutter lag is there. But when it comes to zoom, the Ultra is still king in my opinion. And Ben, you took some shots as well, which it looks like you got some solar glasses from Google. I didn't know that they had those. So those are from 2017. I got those at the Android Arreo launch event which took place during the last eclipse. No kidding. How's that? And I still have history. Yeah, I still have them sitting around along with some of the Oreos, which are definitely not edible at this point. Actually, they probably are. That's the weird thing. They probably are edible. And so what did you take your shot, the shots that you took? What did you take? That was with a Pixel 8 Pro. Pixel 8 Pro. And doing like a digital zoom on the moon or on the sun and moon, I suppose. Yeah, this one actually looks really good with all the cloud. Yeah, I forgot to post some of the better ones. I took some more as it got closer to, I think we had like 80 something percent here. Okay. But yeah, I forgot to post those. Yeah, I used the S24 Ultra as well. And I didn't, you know, it didn't even occur to me to do the space zoom when it was happening, which is, I think it's kind of fine because I always find the space zoom, like it's neat that it gets that close, but then you get that weird, kind of like watery artifact-y thing going on. And I don't know. Sometimes it's just not that pleasing. So I ended up doing the 10x zoom with the glasses over the lens. And I mean, this is as much of an eclipse as we got where I'm at in Petaluma, California. But you know, that's a reasonably sharp-looking photo. It's crisp. Yeah, it's one of the really cool things about the 100x zoom, like the only, the thing that only that could do is you could extract some detail about the solar activity. Cause like, you know, during the eclipse, you can actually see like a lot of the solar activity going on, that was like, if you go back to the photos that I shared, there's like a bunch of red spots on like red bands around some of the photos. I called it a flaming Oreo. And like that's indication of solar activity. That, like, this is probably my favorite of the shots that you did. This, I don't think I, like, that was someone else did that. Actually. Oh, that's not yours? Yeah. No, no, the second reply has some of mine. Oh, dang it. Oh, okay. Still, that's pretty neat. Okay. But that person also uses an S24 Ultra, according to them. Oh, did they? Okay. See, you can get a lot of cool, like the red band on the bottom. Oh, that's really neat. So was it just luck in 2017 that they were releasing Android Oreo and that the sun made a flaming Oreo? Is this just, it's just by luck that we're celebrating Oreo again by some chance? I totally forgot about that. That's amazing. That is, what a marketing moment. Yeah, you're right. This is a photo from a different person. Well, that person just got to compliment you. Cool stuff, all right. Well, that's what the Galaxy S24 and the Pixel 8 Pro can do for the next eclipse, which when does that happen? How many decades? In the US, it's like 21 years from now. Yeah. So what phones will we be using there? Will Android and iOS be two things or one in 21 years? I don't know. Anything could happen. Neural interfaces right in our brain. Singularity, something like, my buds somewhere in there, I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, sounds about right. All right, Michelle, you've been doing the work. You've been putting in the hours on Android 15 and there's more to talk about. What you got? So there's a whole bunch of things to talk about starting with a new potential feature called adaptive timeout. So if you use your phone right now, there's a lot of different screen options that you can do to control when your phone screen automatically times out. There's a display timeout function, which basically it times out your screen if you set it for like five minutes and you don't touch the phone for five minutes, it'll time out. And then on the Pixel at least, there's an option to extend that timeout automatically so long as you're actively looking at your phone that's called, I think, I forgot what it's called on the Pixel, but that feature was introduced with the Pixel 4 and now it looks like Google might be introducing a feature that basically does the opposite of that, where if you're not actively using your phone, it'll time out your screen early so that you're not accidentally leaving your phone out to the side for like 30 minutes because you have a screen timeout of 30 minutes and then someone else picks up your phone and starts using it. This phone, sorry, this feature adaptive timeout will somehow detect that you're not using your phone, probably through like some proximity sensor or potentially the camera as well. And then decide if you're not using your phone, it'll lock your screen early and then lock your phone early so that you have to unlock it again to actively use it. So it's a minor security change. It might help you if you like to leave your screen timeout to a longer period. I personally like to do that, like I leave my screen timeout at like 15 minutes because I hate, because I always check it and like have to test something and then I hate having to unlock it. And it's like on a desk, usually my phone. So it's not in front of my face. So I don't have it like checking my face to keep it awake. So this feature would basically let me have it on my table for 15 minutes, but like when I'm not using it after a period of time, it would just automatically lock itself. So that's- I end up having my screen timeout. Like if I'm reviewing a device, then I set it very long because same thing, it's super annoying to like continue to have to unlock my phone and everything. But when I'm kind of like past that point and I'm just using a device the way I want to use it, I usually set it for a minute, which I feel like is kind of like the best of both worlds. It's not so short that I'm constantly like, you know, fighting it. And it's not so long that I'm draining battery at that point. I mean, I am more than I would be at 15 seconds, but yeah. Yeah. The next feature is something that I've talked about before. It's called Private Space. This creates a separate user profile on your device and it lets you install apps onto that device. So if you've ever used a Samsung phone before, you may have heard of a feature called Secure Folder. Private Space and Android 15 basically does the same thing, although it probably it works differently under the hood. You create a new profile, you sign in if you want to with a Google account or you create a new one, which Google recommends. And then that Google account, you can use to download apps and all the data and histories kept separate if you made a new one. And all the apps that you download onto that Private Space are kept hidden from the main profile whenever it's locked. I think the more interesting article actually Jason to show is the next one, which is actually a full hands-on demonstration of the feature in question. I did a video for Android Authority showing the feature running on my Pixel 8 Pro. And it's a five minute video. It goes through the setup process and then actually shows the feature in question. You can optionally create an entirely new screen lock that Jason is showing on screen right now, or you can just use your existing screen lock. You can install whatever apps you want to this Private Space. You can choose whether or not the Private Space automatically locks whenever you lock your device. And there's a whole bunch of other features and changes that Google has made. Like there's an indicator in the status bar that tells you when you're using an app that's in the Private Space so that you know to not accidentally cross reference information leaking your own data into the main profile. This feature is basically like, it basically takes Android's existing profiles feature and just extends it to allow you to hide apps from the main profile user whenever you want to. Like a lot of users have been doing something similar with the work profile. They've been using third-party apps to create like a work profile they can install apps onto and then lock that profile. But like work profile is not really meant for that purpose. It's kind of like a hacky solution to be able to clone apps and like make like a separate profile. But this is like a built-in native version of those kind of app hiders or like work profile solutions. And basically, but if you've ever wanted to see a secure folder like solution on stock Android or on a Pixel phone, this looks like it's going to be just that. And it's not available yet. I had to activate it manually to record this video. And it looks like it's mostly working. There were still, I think, there was still one placeholder asset during the setup, but it looks like it's mostly functional. There might be some bugs that you can encounter. It changes the app drawer down below so that it kind of splits them into two sections. Is that what I'm noticing there? That like the bottom? Yeah. So there's a separate section at the bottom. Third ends up being in private space. There's a separate section at the bottom of the Pixel launcher called private where it's located. And you can also choose to hide that entirely so that that section doesn't appear at all. So nobody else knows that you have a private space set up. And then if you do choose to hide that private space, you have to actively search in the Pixel launcher search bar for private space. And then you can launch it. And it'll show up at the bottom. But yeah. Nice. Okay. The borrowing or taking over of features from other phones, like Samsung's had this sort of feature. We've seen this on a lot of other devices where they've integrated this and come in as like a native feature into Android 15. Not bad. It's kind of about time, I think. This sort of thing has been around for a long time. And the next feature is something that I think got a lot of people upset or I think the wrong reason. Even though I learned later, this is apparently something that iOS has already done for a long time. And it's that when you disable Bluetooth Android will now show an option to automatically turn it back on the next day. So like a story we'll talk about later today as Jason alluded to is the launch of the Find My Device Network. Well, that network really relies on people having Bluetooth enabled so that you can send beacons. You can receive beacons from nearby devices so that you can contribute the aggregated location of devices on the network. But if everyone has Bluetooth turned off, then the network is kind of useless because you don't have anything contributing to the network's all the location data that it needs. So Android 15, instead of allowing users to permanently turn off Bluetooth and letting this leave it off for days without ever contributing to the Find My Device Network or enjoying features like QuickShare, will now introduce a new toggle in the Bluetooth settings page and the Quick Settings panel that allows you to turn on, automatically turning on Bluetooth the next day. So like when you turn off Bluetooth, there'll be a toggle that says automatically turn on tomorrow. And then if you choose to leave that toggle enabled, the next day Bluetooth will turn on by itself so that you don't have to remember to turn it on. So this could be useful if you're like, you know, you need to turn off Bluetooth because there's some interference going on. You want someone else to connect to some device you're using or you just wanna save some miniscule amount of battery for some reason, even though Bluetooth barely takes any battery at all these days. This feature will let you temporarily pause your Bluetooth use and then have it automatically be turned on the next day. Nice. And so if I didn't have the Bluetooth scanning thing toggled, then it would operate the way it does now. Like I could turn off Bluetooth in my settings and it would stay off indefinitely. Is that right? Well, Bluetooth scanning is, yeah. You can, from what I know, you should be able to still turn off Bluetooth entirely. You should be able to ignore the automatically turn on toggle and just turn off Bluetooth if you want to. This is just an option that Google is now like putting in front of users so that, you know, they know that they can pause instead of permanently disable the Bluetooth radio. I mean, super important for the integrity of, yeah, the find my device thing, which we will talk about very soon. If I can jump in. It's nice that it works that way because on iOS it's actually very different. I was checking on my iPhone. If you turn off Bluetooth from the quick settings, it just automatically goes to, it'll turn back on tomorrow, there's no option. But if you turn it off from in the settings menu, there's no message about it not turning off for the day. Like it'll just stay off at that point. So it's nice that you'll have like a button that specifically says that. So it's different behavior whether you do it from the quick settings versus the actual settings. Yeah, I don't think you can really see it. Yeah, if you turn it off from the Bluetooth menu, there's a little message that shows up that says it's gonna turn it off until tomorrow. And then if you turn it off from in the actual settings menu, it just turns off. Okay. And actually the more I think about that, I can understand that, right? Like if you're doing that through the quick settings, maybe it's more likely that you're doing it on a temporary basis because you're getting to it quick versus diving into the settings, which you would only really do if that was the only result or potentially if you wanted to turn it off long-term, I guess. But yeah, that sort of makes sense to me. Kind of like a problem. I mean, I guess it's more like if you're a pro and you know what you're doing and you're specifically wanting to do it, then you don't have to worry about the OS preempting, preempting your decision to turn off your Bluetooth, dang it. But obviously, yeah, for most times or for most people, maybe that's overkill, not necessary. So I like that though. It's both, yeah, always both is good, like the easy and then like the specific or the auto and the specific, I don't know, something like that. Yeah. Sweet. And the last change that I wanted to highlight is a basically a follow-up on the revamped desktop mode experience that I've been tracking since late 2022. So for those of you who don't know Android 10, since Android 10, Android has had a built-in desktop mode launcher. It's incredibly bare-bones. All it has is like a single app drawer that you can launch apps in and it's only meant for developers to test what their apps look like on multi-display experiences. But since late 2022, Google has been working to revamp this experience so that it's actually more usable, kind of like Samsung DeX on Samsung devices or Motorola is ready for. And a lot of the work that Google has been doing in the background has focused on improving the windowing capabilities of Android apps. So like when you open a Android app in a floating window, what can you do with that window? A lot of, for the longest time, you could basically just close it and that's it. But in recent builds of Android 14, you know, Android 14 QPR3 and Android 15 developer preview two, they've been a lot of improvements so that you now have the capability of snapping windows to the side, hovering over the maximize button and having like these little window snap layouts. You can, you know, basically a lot of things that you see on desktop operating systems, Google is working to add to Android. And I recorded this video that Jason is showing off on the video feed right now that shows some of these windowing capabilities. Now, one thing I wanted to note is that launcher you see in the background, that's not actually part of the desktop experience I'm showing off, that's a third party, technically not third party. It's a Google developed app in AOSP that they use to test multi-display experiences but it was handy for showing off this desktop mode, these windowing changes. And so what you should be focusing on is just me moving around this Firefox window, the Twitter window, maximizing, minimizing, you know, like expanding, snapping, all that stuff. That's what I'm showing off here. And a lot of improvements have been made and a lot of improvements still need to be made for this to actually match decks or even get close to desktop functionality. For example, you can't use keyboard shortcuts to snap windows, which I use all the time, to like move windows around. The experience is kind of buggy for me, like when I opened an app, it would like snap in from the bottom instead of like, there's nothing on the bottom. There's no, I haven't seen any work at all being done on the actual task bar at the bottom to make it more like a desktop operating system. There's just so much that looks like it needs to be done. So I'm kind of right now kind of doubting this might actually launch in Android 15. You might even see it in like the next release. It looks like this is still so unfinished, but we know that work is being done. This is something that Google is actually finally doing. You know, if you wanted to- Finally- Decks like desktop mode- It's been such a long road to this great- It's like Android, they're finally working on it. Yeah, I mean, literal years at this point, I remember, God, I think it was during the pandemic, even, because I think I was upstairs playing around with some of the earlier seeds of this sort of thing hitting. And it was really, really early then and completely unusable, but it was like, okay, obviously there's something to happen in here. And here we are four years later and we're still not quite there. It's interesting how some things don't make the fast track. They literally take that long to see the light of day. Well, you know what has actually- Oh, sorry, go ahead, Michelle. No, this is a little off topic, but it kind of highlights one frustrating part about the Android OS is that a lot of the major features are dictated by basically, how does Google see the importance of this feature? Like Samsung and other companies for years have pushed desktop mode like experiences, but because Google hasn't seen it as a priority, this whole feature has stagnated because there's not really much of an incentive for developers to build apps and experiences that work well on desktop modes because there's no like base solution for everyone to follow, right? Like over the years that's changed, of course, because now we have Chrome OS, you're building apps for PCs, they're Google Play games on an emulator and that's changed over time, right? But like for a long time, the pace of development of desktop mode has been dictated by Google. And now that it's a priority, finally, hopefully we'll see this explode in popularity, but it's gonna take a few years. Yeah. I think you're right. That a lot of times like the things that we need in daily life just don't align. And I think to give Google credit, they always try to make their best guess or obviously they probably have their own OKRs, product roadmaps and things like that. And so that's kind of been a frustrating thing. And I have always said that, or I've said for many years that the good thing is that usually the Android team kind of reaches out to us and asks for feedback. Although sometimes that feedback is, hey, we're working on this thing, do you guys wanna use it and then it's like crickets? So I'm kind of curious how this will be picked up because that is a really good point Michelle that there's sometimes like a little bit of a discrepancy between what, for better or for worse, what a developer actually needs and what Google provides. And then sometimes, it's always like the chicken and egg problem with everything else, like large screens, like other things that, you know, if no one's doing it, then if no one's supporting it, no developer's supporting it, then why does Google work on it? But then again, if Google's not working on it, then Google's then developers never could support it. So it's like, at some point someone takes a shot and maybe they get lucky. I'm curious, Ben, to know if you have a strong opinion on this, have solutions like this, like if we were to take a look at the one that comes to mind, of course, is Samsung Dex. Have solutions like this proven themselves in the market at this point to be a valuable feature. I know that some people like, you know, enjoy working in these, but this isn't a new thing. Google, of course, hasn't rolled it out into kind of the wider Android yet. And that would be new when they do that. But we've seen this for years. What's your take as far as like, how much consumers, how much users actually want this sort of functionality? I kind of have mixed feelings on it. I personally don't, like I get the appeal of, you know, plug your phone into a monitor and you have a computer, but I've never specifically wanted to do that because I've never had anything more powerful enough to do that. As things continue to shift, maybe that's more useful. The thing I find desktop mode most useful for is how Samsung does it on tablets because you can run the next full screen. That is genuinely useful and had me strongly considering getting a Samsung tablet instead of a Pixel tablet. So I would love to see Google do the same thing desktop mode, but yeah, like someone in chat just said, if I'm going to use a laptop, I'm just going to use an actual laptop because my phone's not going to do most of what my laptop is. Yeah, interesting. Well, cool. That's the Android 15 roundup from Michelle. And you may have even had more that we didn't talk about. I don't know. I feel like you're all over the map when it comes to what's coming through Android 15. There's more, it's just, yeah, yesterday was all about the solar eclipse, so all the other articles I wrote on the right are postponed for now. You are forgiven, Michelle. You know, it also happened yesterday, which I think also bears a lot of attention because speaking of things that have taken a while to see the light of day and talking about things that Michelle has been digging into for a really long time. Yesterday was a big day because finally, finally, finally, Google rolled out the Find My Device Network for Android. I mean, Michelle, where you, I mean, I know you're kind of preoccupied with the actual, you know, wonderful natural phenomenon. How does it feel for the Find My Device Network to finally be here? And what is it, like, does it look like what we hoped it would look like at this point? Question mark. I think one of the most interesting bits about the announcement was how they're treating the default, like the collection of location data. Like they talk about it in their security blog, but like instead of by default, where every single, where like the location of a device is determined by at least one nearby device, sending, picking up the beacon that's being broadcasted, in order for a device location to be reported, there has to be at least multiple devices picking it up and then reporting it. Like they call it aggregated location reporting. And Google says that that allows or that mitigates the potential for someone to, you know, plant a tracker on someone. And then that person unknowingly takes that tracker back to their house and then you can figure out where they live. Well, like this feature requires, you know, if you're only having like one or two devices and you have your location set in your Google account, right, so like your location tracking can be ignored entirely at your house. And if you only have one device that's reporting location of that tracker tag, then it won't be reported at all. So like that's a really interesting approach that Google is taking to, you know, their device tracking network versus Apple's, which is I believe only single device is required. And Google does have that as an option. You can enable the ability to have a device location be reported if only one nearby device picks it up. But that's not the default. There, Google is going with the multi-device approach as the default. And I think that's really interesting. And a lot of tracker hardware to come kind of tapping into this, Ben, do you think, like what's your opinion on the need for this kind of update to define my device network? I know people have been definitely waiting for it for a long time. I think any sort of cross-platform support on technologies like this is a good thing. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think this is just fine. My device in general has been, you know, it's useful functionality and it's been around for years, but this is really putting a spotlight on it and expanding it. And like, I know even just the other day, I was talking about this with my wife because she lost her phone in the house. And I was saying like, man, it's gonna be really nice in a few days because, you know, Nest devices also participate in this. So you're gonna be able to find your phone in your house just by looking and saying, oh, it's near this Nest Hub. So I can just go over there and look near there instead of searching the whole house because previously they just gave me an address. And the same with trackers. I think Airtags have like really proven their worth even though they have their privacy concerns. And while those networks existed before, I think Apple's network also kind of killed, you know, independent networks because why would you use an independent network when you can use one that's on everyone's phone? So I think this finally, you know, gives Android users the ability to tap into a similarly sized network, arguably a bigger one once this is fully global. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it a lot. I've been really excited about this. Yeah, it's been a long time coming, that's for sure. And we'll see how it rolls out. For now, the Find My Device is tracking phones and tablets but headphones are coming soon and there will be, and as mentioned, the Android ecosystem of trackers coming and there will be support for third party trackers starting in Find My Device starting in May. And not only that, if you have a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro, you're gonna get a little bit of something extra. And I think we've mentioned this before, where tracking is even possible if you have a dead battery on specifically for now your Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro because of specialized Pixel hardware. Again, that special secret sauce that Pixel have, but hopefully that will be, you know, kind of propagated out to other devices. But yeah, go ahead and check it out. I just downloaded mine today that the interface is a little bit different, a little more cleaned up than kind of like, you know, the previous device managers and like that. So yeah, it looked really easy to use and it even picked up, at least in Find My Devices, it actually picks up a Bluetooth speaker that I have or it lists a Bluetooth speaker that I have at my sister's house in Maryland. Yeah, it's all very nice and easy to use so far. Haven't lost anything just yet, but we'll see. The fact that, and like as you mentioned, Ben has chat mentioned too, that the fact that the Nest devices participated great because it's just not helpful when you know that it's at your house and it could be anywhere in your house. So I'm not looking forward to losing my phone, but I look forward to using Find My Devices for the cases in which I lost my phone, so yep. I wish this had happened a couple of months ago because right about a month ago I lost my wallet and I've spent the entire month like refusing to accept that it's truly lost because it makes no sense to me that I did lose it, like I've retraced my steps and everything, I'm like, God, it's just gotta be here somewhere, like it's gotta be here in the house and I just have absolutely, like maybe it fell in between some cushions somewhere and I'm finally at the point where I'm replacing all the credit cards and you know, other things that I lost and everything which means I'm probably gonna find it, but if this was here a couple of months ago, then I could, you know, track it to, potentially track it to wherever it actually is. So anyways, happy it's here later than not. That specialized pixel hardware, by the way, it's not really that special, it's just, it's a hard requirement, like what you have to have is just basically a line that's able to power the Bluetooth chip when the rest of the components are powered off, right? So if you can't give power to the Bluetooth chip, then it's not able to continue broadcasting those beacons that other nearby devices can pick up. And right now it looks like only the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro support that feature because like they were manufactured with that in mind and they also support that feature, like you know, in the Bluetooth chip level and unfortunately it looks like at least for now, Google's older devices don't support that. Another L for Pixel Fold users, unfortunately. Yeah, right, right. I got my third one to search though, so. At least there's that. Sorry, Pixel Fold users, but it's not my fault. And I wonder if other manufacturers are gonna start prioritizing this as an extra feature in their feature set as well. I think Google did tell some publications that they are working with SOC vendors and OEMs to enable this powered off mining feature on their devices. Yeah, good, good. Great feature, add that, y'all. Okay, well, we have our weekly patron pick. Every week we give patrons who support Android Faithful, patreon.com slash Android Faithful the opportunity to vote on their favorite of three stories. So we put up a poll with three stories to choose from and we say, hey, which one do you want us to talk about on the show? And the winner, we do the discussion. Before all of that though, we've been bringing in all of your AI-generated Android news graphics images and Joe Catskill sent this creation, which I'm having a hard time navigating, the little Android guy basically reporting the news on what appears to be some sort of a podcast, a news podcast. So this could really be any one of us if we're honest here. Joe, thank you for submitting this. Definitely a call to everyone who's listening, not just patrons, but if you want to send in your creations, you can just send it into contact at androidfaithful.com. And then patrons, of course, were given the ability to vote between three stories. And, oh, I don't have the results here, but I know that Samsung, sorry about that, Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 Pro tipped to have larger battery. That did not win. Asus refund Zenfone buyer for failing to provide bootloader unlock tools as promised. That didn't win. But what did win is this new gadget lets you run Samsung DeX on your car screen. Basically, this is a dongle, and yes, it is a Kickstarter. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt. It's not something that like Samsung is creating, which I'm not surprised. Like, I don't know, something about this screams like bad idea to me, but it's called the Auto Pro X. It surpassed its $5,000 goal. It's now sitting, I checked before showtime, right around $100,000, 10 days to go on this. And it is a $199 puck style device that you plug into the car's USB port. And then on the phone, you tap the DeX option in Galaxy Quick Settings. And poof, you've got DeX appearing in your dash on a touch screen, you know, in car monitor. So, you know, I mean, sure, like I understand, I love putting things in all different places and seeing how it works and everything. Just don't do this while driving. Lead this to when you're parked. Don't be navigating your Samsung DeX while you're driving. I just think it's a horrible idea. But if you're parked, go for it. Go nuts. What do y'all think of this? Man, do people love DeX? I, I, I, do people love- I don't know, do people love DeX? External, I feel like we have some very, among the Android faithful family have. I know some of y'all just love or needs that external display for your mobile devices. And I know this is just like a, you know, another option, especially with like, you know, every single like, you know, major manufacturers coming out with these new, much more smarter cars with biggest, biggest screens and everything. So, I mean, what you're gonna do with that big screen, right? So I personally wouldn't, just for my own safety. Man, I don't even feel like I sound like a funny daddy. I'm just worried about everybody's safety right now. Yeah. Replay Jason's current previous PSA on, on not driving distracted. But there's a, there's obviously an appetite for it. 100,000, $102,000 worth of appetite at least, at least. So. Yeah. Yeah. Total of 684 people. And Michelle, anybody? I feel like a lot of cars, I don't even know if this would work on that many cars, like that exactly, especially because like, so many cars that you, that even have a screen have like dials to touch them. They don't have touch screens or they have like resistive touch screens, which would be an absolute nightmare to have the navigate of smart interface with the resistive touch screen. You'd need a really modern car, a really newer car to actually enjoy this. And even then like, you can only really enjoy this when you're parked. Yeah. Or you should really only be doing this while you're parked. I don't know, maybe there's some controls in there to, for it to know if you're, you know, moving. And if so, then to deactivate it. But something tells me it might, that might be disabled, you know, possibly if that does exist. Like I know in, in our car, you know, we do have a Tesla and it has like a YouTube app in the interface, but you can't, you can't do that app unless the car knows that you're parked like in, and not just like stop at a light like parked. So, you know, there are ways to do these things safely, but yeah, interesting, interesting. Dex in the car, not something that I saw coming. Anyways, you wanted it, you got it. Thank you for your support. Oh, wonderful patrons, patreon.com slash Android faithful. If you want to help support the show, you certainly can. We'd love to have you on board. And then you too can place your vote for some of the stories we talk about on this show. Anyways, patreon.com slash Android faithful. All right, coming up next, we've got some hardware to talk about. Not a lot of hardware, but a little bit. Okay, when we, this was actually something that we talked about from a rumor standpoint. Yeah. A handful of episodes and now it's real. See, rumors do come true. Yeah, I was trying to figure out, like as I keep calling them leaky pekeys, what does a leaky peaky turn into? Like a mobile manifestation or something like the kids say it manifested finally. I don't know, but mobile manifestation sounds like a poltergeist thing. Mobile manifestation. Spooky phones. But this isn't spooky. This is the Motorola Edge 50 pro. At least that's what it's called in India where it has been released. We talked about this a few episodes ago and this is their new. And we've been trying to figure out what to call the lower premium upper mid range. And I think GSM arena, they called it, well, I don't know what they call it for. Oh, shoot. They called it. They called it the premium upper mid range. Premium upper mid range. Premium upper mid range, which I don't know. For some reason, really music when I read it, I'm on three hours of sleep, so that's probably why, but I don't actually know that I read it again. I don't know if it's that clear, but we'll call it the new premium upper mid range. I'm trying to like do the trigonometry in my brain, the premium upper mid range. So it is a premium device and it's mid range, but upper mid range. Yes. So it's official, it's out. And if you aren't on the video, if you aren't watching the video version of this podcast and your audio only, this was the one that we talked about with the very kind of distinct, a little bit different back design where the camera bump was kind of a very subtle, you know, raised bump that kind of like kind of like, kind of flowed and sloped very subtly into the rest of the phone. A gentle, it's like a gentle stuff. Yeah, it's gentle. And like the back material kind of flows in between the units on the camera bump, very cute. Well, you don't just have to kind of admire it on the internet. It is real, at least for now in India. It will be coming to the US, though probably under a different name and with slightly different specs. But what we can tell now is that, yes, this phone is real. It has a camera bump with four lenses. It's got a curved 6.7 inch POLED display that runs at 1220p resolution and the 144 Hertz refresh. It is rocking the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor, 12 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage. So not that shabby at all. It's got a pretty, pretty healthy size battery at 4,500 milliamps. And it has a 125 watt proprietary wired charging and 50 watt wireless charging. And not only that, not only that, you actually get a wireless charging stand included with the phone, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, so maybe that's the premium part of the premium upper mid range. You get the stand with it. But yeah, there is no US release yet, but keep an eye out for it. Just because we got to talk about AI a little bit more, worth noting that this is the first Motorola smartphone with their AI photo enhancement engine, which has optimizations for things like motion capture and color segmentation. So again, even your mid range phones are not going to be shipping without AI these days. So there you go. And it does come in some lovely color ways of black and lavender. And there's also a limited edition Moonlight Pearl. So yeah, we'll have to see what it finally is named and looks like when it comes to the US, but there you go. Rumors are no longer rumors. There are real phone with, you know, not designed. One thing I find funny about this is that, okay, so this is like a mid range, but a premium mid range. Premium upper mid range. And we're back to the curved display. Like the display like whiplash of like, what is premium? What is desired? What is not desired? It's so all over the map at this point because we started with flat displays. And then once the curbies started happening, then it was like, oh, the premium phones must have the curbies because you don't get those on the other phones. That's too expensive for the other phones. And then now we're kind of like on the opposite side where the premium devices are getting the flat displays because no one actually wants the curbies. And now the curbies are coming to the mid range premiums. They're just all over the place. They're just like, okay, fine. We'll bring it over here now. We'll see how these people like it. Yeah. And Motorola's curve screen on the Edge series is something else because it's curved on all four sides. Oh boy. If you look at it from like a top corner angle, it just looks freaky. I did not like that last year with the Edge Plus. So the top and the bottom are the same? That's how the line came about. Yeah, I don't like it at all. Oh wow. It's staying true to its name. Like the original Motorola Edge, it was called the Edge because it was their first like super waterfall curve display on a phone. Well, there you go. I guess you gotta lean into it at this point. I like that down that edge that the Edge, I'm sorry, I'm being old. It's like part of me is like, but it has no edges. That's the point, whether they called the Edge. I'm sorry, I'm just being old and I was asleep. But yes, I don't know. Yeah, curved screens, Motorola Edge 50 Pro. There you go. Possibly the Edge Plus in the US will wait and see. So. We will just have to wait and see. And we will, because that's what we do here. Okay. And then now it's already time to start talking about the Galaxy S25 apparently. And actually, Ben, we have started into the long stream of articles that you have written in the past day or two. So tell us a little bit about this. This is a report that says the Samsung is sticking with the Exynos and Qualcomm strategy, which is what we saw with the S24 after the S23 was like all Qualcomm. Is this, is this a significant difference? What does this mean? So yeah, this is a report out of Korea. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, of course, but it is that the S25 will again use a mix of Exynos and Snapdragon. But the, so it'll be the same as what we have now with the S24, most likely. But it's interesting just because a couple of years ago Samsung had been talking about, you know, we're going to make this our own chip that's unique to Samsung phones, which Exynos kind of already is, but they were saying it was going to be something else. But now it seems like that's probably not happening. It's weird. On the timetable or at all? It seems like not at all because it hasn't been talked about for a long time. Oh, okay. Interesting. Who knows, it may have just been them covering fire because at the time when they announced that or when they were talking about that, it was during that whole, what is it? I think it was like GOS or something, that thing where they were like throttling games. Yeah. It was back during that time. So who knows what's going to happen, but at the very least it seems like the original timetable of this happening next year is probably not going to happen. And to be honest, it's probably not going to happen at all because why would it? All right, so there's not much more to see than potentially from there. I mean, yeah. I mean, for the longest time, the Samsungs were a different processor in the U.S. versus overseas. And then there was that small reprieve like what you were talking about. And then it just kind of came back again. I guess the question that I had if they were doing their own processor, how would that actually be different from something like the Exynos? Would that be akin to Google's Tensor hardware and kind of the focus or customization that they've done with their hardware around the AI functions happening on the devices? That's something similar to what Samsung would be doing if they were to do their own chip or something. And I don't even know how that differs from what the Exynos chip might be doing on these devices. Actually, quick question. I didn't read the original report. I only saw the summary that you guys wrote and I don't recall right now, a little tired. But did they say if the Ultra will also use Exynos in some regions because the S24 Ultra right now uses Snapdragon globally? Yeah, no, it didn't say it basically said the strategy is not going to change next year, basically. It's just going to be the same thing. Presumably, yes, it'll just be Snapdragon always in the Ultra, which is probably the best strategy for them, otherwise. Interesting stuff. All right, we have, yeah, we've got some themes running through our app section this week. So when you've got the first one, take it away. We do, and we really did enjoy talking about Beeper. I think at least it was very exciting. Beeper had its place. Beeper had its place. It had its spotlight. It was so, there was Sturm and Drang and all kinds of stuff going on. There's like, we get Congress people involved. Well, this is not quite as spicy as that news, but it is pretty big news for Beeper. And so Beeper has been acquired by Automatic, Automatic being the company behind WordPress and behind Perennial. WordPress.com. WordPress.com, sorry. And Perennial podcast, pod catcher favorite, pocket casts. That was a lot of peas. I did not mean for there to be so many peas in that, but yeah, so Automatic has acquired Beeper. And yeah, it's kind of to go along with that as well. If you have been trying to use Beeper, they're kind of like, unified messaging client. You know that there was a wait list and it's been a pretty long one. You had to get like an invite and things like that. Well, now with this acquisition, Beeper has dropped its wait list and it will be free to use following the acquisition. There was kind of like a period where, you know, Beeper did have a super super at some point during the kind of spicy period, but no, it will remain free to use and Automatic has basically said they're gonna be, you know, kind of leaving them to do their thing more or less. And yeah, you can go ahead and download Beeper either on one of many clients, Android, iOS desktop and sign up for account today. I did right before the show. I did not get a chance to set it up yet, but there you go. Eric Midzikowski, former CEO of Beeper is now Automatic head of messaging. And it does seem like Automatic is now positioning Beeper as their kind of messaging app and they had another app before or they had another app in their stable before. I thought I saw that, but I did not write it down in my notes. Yes, yeah. Text.com. Text.com, yeah. Yeah, so it sounds like another interesting acquisition for Automatic. So is this a, well, how do you guys feel about this? Is a good move for them? Both the kind of free, the freeing, the freeing of Beeper both from a wait list and both of, you know, kind of like a fee to use. And what do you mean? Like, do you have good hopes or high hopes for, you know, Automatic and Beeper as a partnership? Personally, yeah, I couldn't think of a better partnership for them, especially with the text.com context because text.com, which seems like nobody really knew about. Yeah, I'm kind of the same thing. Yeah, it does the exact same thing as Beeper, but now they're just gonna merge together in time. And yeah. Text.com, just text.com. That's so weird that I've never heard of this before. So back when the whole nothing chats situation was going on, they're the ones, they're among the ones who were digging in and finding all these security vulnerabilities. So that was the first time a lot of people figured out who they were. But yeah, it's just, it's an app that does pretty much the same thing as Beeper, but theirs was not as well known. So yeah, it'll be nice to put them together and it will probably give Beeper quite a boost in terms of development speed now because text.com already had a pretty sizable team. I think this acquisition... Oh, go ahead, sorry, Michelle. Sorry, I think this acquisition is really interesting in like how forward thinking, or like it's a bit of a big gamble to be honest, but they're really forward thinking, like they're seeing the regulatory landscape and what's happening to Apple in the EU and the US potentially. And basically seeing that right now, consumers use a whole bunch of different messaging apps spread out across the world. They're basically seeing a future where there are still a lot of different messaging apps, but they're being forced to be interoperable with one another. And they're seeing a future where instead of a brand or a consumer just using that individual app, they're gonna use Beeper or text.com as a super messaging app that encompasses all these messaging apps so that you can communicate with multiple different users on all these different platforms without having to, as a business, 30 different social media managers for 30 different platforms, starting messaging like, business communication managers, you could just have like one super app to manage all these different platforms that communicate to your users that way and like automate your messages to all these different users. So like, you have like iMessage Business Chat or whatever they call it. You have RCS Business Chat. You have WhatsApp Business Chat. You know, like instead of having all these three different platforms, you can have it all into one super app which will now be called Beeper from automatic. So you can automatically send one message to a lot of platforms. Okay, I'm sorry, I had to do it. I kind of bypassed the one client to rule them all. Actually on the note of security as well. And we talked a lot about this kind of like in the whole like Apple iMessage like, Sturman drawing, I think one thing that Beeper, I mean, I was a fan of their approach and the things that Eric had to say about like the various things that came up is that security is kind of like, you know, paramount to them and they were very transparent about even though, you know, Apple wanted to argue about the security of their iMessage solution. It is important to them security and something to note is that there will be no more cloud bridges for syncing messages between apps and Beeper. All of the syncing that will, you know, basically whatever service you're using it for, WhatsApp, Signal, et cetera. All of that syncing will be on device as opposed to kind of going out to some cloud bridge. So more secure and more private not letting your data get into the hands of other people just letting it stay on device. So again, kind of going along with, I think they're messaging in the last few months and good to see that as well. So I don't feel bad at all about putting it on my devices and we'll see where it goes. Well, speaking of privacy and security tied to iMessage and Android, this is the second movement of this theme. Sunbird, which tried the whole iMessage on Android thing in 2022 in tandem with the Nothing Phone, Nothing Chats, is back with a relaunch of its worldwide domination plan. You might recall maybe at this point the original Nothing Chats had a pretty big security issue. Ben, you of course, we wrote about this. Tell us about what's different now with what they're offering and does it address these? Or are they even talking about it? I'm curious. Yeah, so Sunbird's original issue was basically just leaking everything that users put into it in real time, which was terrifying. How do you recover from that? I don't know, but... I cannot believe they're even trying to be honest. But they came back, they put out a press release and blog posts and all this stuff talking about how they've spent the past several months updating the app and changing all these things. So, yeah, they claim that now their new architecture is not going to put anything in. It's not gonna be stored for more than two days on their systems. It won't be sitting in Firebase as it was previously. They're claiming that they fixed it, basically. I do not have the security knowledge to know if they actually did, and we won't know for a while because it's still in closed beta, which is just they're sending invites to an undisclosed number of people every once in a while, starting earlier this, or starting late last week. Who's to say we won't know until they fix it, until they get it in more people's hands? Because we didn't know that they had all these problems for over two years because they didn't let anyone have it. The only reason we found out is because nothing partnered with them and nothing Chats was available and then it was found within a day. That was such a mess. I mean, that was so damn unfortunate for that was an insane four days. Yeah, but unfortunately, we won't know. But you know what? Nothing like you probably should have done your due diligence a little bit better than this, right? Like, yeah, be sure of the partnerships you're making or, you know, they're bulletproof and this obviously was not. Yeah, and the thing that started going that I had noticed which in the press release, which just kind of was like not really a red flag, but just funny is that they talked about how, you know, like one of the new things that they've done is they have a formal advisor to like help with these kinds of things. And he was a director of engineering at Google on Gmail. But he is not anymore. They listed him as, yes, he works at Google and they were like all proud of the fact, but he left Google like last month and they just didn't bother to check or their press release went out. Oh, dear. So I don't I don't I don't trust it. We'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah, besides the security concerns, given their, you know, their prior experience with launching this app, like now that we've seen what happens when Beeper has launched their I message, you know, support and then Apple went really hard at killing it. And they successfully killed it. Like Beeper has given up on supporting I message for now. Like besides security concerns with Sunbird, like who knows who's going to say that Apple isn't going to go after them just as hard, if not harder. Mm hmm. And they have a lot less. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say the only reason that this one might survive for a while is because it's just based on Macs. Just like all the other ones, it's just cloud Macs that you sink into. Right. So that Apple doesn't seem to care about that, at least is like blue bubbles and stuff is still running. If you're on their hardware, they don't mind. Kind of surprising to me that they don't care about that, you know. But yeah, maybe it's just a matter of attracting the eye of Sauron on, you know, this little effort once they have publicly launched. Yeah. Yeah, interesting, nonetheless. And then finally, when one more theme to encompass. One more thing, it's always AI. It's always AI. It's always AI these days, at least the last year and for the foreseeable future, it always be AI. So, you know, we're very familiar, you know, with Magic Eraser as it exists on Google and the Pixel phones. And of course, Google is, you know, in part lending some of their, you know, magic, I don't know, Magic Eraser, particularly, I meant more like in the amorphous magic. And of course, Samsung has its own kind of like, you know, suite now of Galaxy AI, because everybody has to have AI now. Well, it seems like a new player has entered the chat in terms of rolling out their own AI tools. And Ben, you wrote a little something about this new kind of like player in the AI space. I mean, I presume they've been doing AI for now, but the kind of the branded like, hey, we got AI toys too. Who is that? Who's coming out with a new AI toy, Ben? Yeah, so OnePlus is rolling out AI Eraser, which is basically just Magic Eraser from the Pixel. Yeah. So you can, you know, highlight things and delete it and it'll fill in the gap. It seems fine, but it's nothing super new. But yeah, so that's available now on OnePlus 12, 12R, Open 11 and one of the recent Nord phones. Is it as full featured as like Magic Eraser is now? Or is it I don't mean to pick on them, but is it less? Like literally, does it have less features or? I haven't I haven't used it yet, but it seems like it's it's like the old Magic Eraser, like the one that launched on what the I think that launched on the seven. Yeah, it's not Magic Editor, the one that's like full AI where it will fill in gaps when you remove objects and stuff. It's just it will delete stuff. So just the generative fill part, which OK. Well, I mean, speaking of Magic Editor, actually, there is a little bit of something interesting going on in terms of the availability of Magic Editor, which currently is a Google One subscription only type feature. But Google is kind of taking Magic Editor kind of freemium and doing what are the they're going to make Magic Editor free to use with a big asterisk, and that is with metered saves. So basically, more or less every month, you're going to get a quota of magic edits and like the photos that you can use Magic Editor on. Once you have reached that quota, you won't be able to do any more until your quota refreshes every month. So basically, everyone, you know, will get, you know, some amount of magic edits to use. If you do have Google One, then basically that metered save, those that quota goes away and you can use it all you want, unlimited. So that's kind of like, you know, the sell there for Google One. And yeah, so rather than just making an exclusive feature, it's now a free, a fairly free, but not 100 percent free feature to use. Was this a good move on their part to make it more freemium to kind of lessen that pixel exclusivity? Um, question, you know, a little bit of a taste. One more. But you know what? Google is not alone in this. Like this is this is a big part of how AI services are monetizing is that they give a little bit of that free stuff at the beginning at the beginning of every month. And it's like, OK, you get 10 credits this month. And so, yeah, sure, you can use this to an extent for free. And then if you want more than that, and then at that point, you know, the hope, of course, being that as a user, you start to kind of come up with ways and reasons beyond curiosity that motivate you to then pony up and pay, you know, for the full suite. So to that end, I guess I'm not that surprised to see this. This is all speculative, by the way. This was just coming from an APK teardown from seeing, you know, those little text bits that kind of just hint at metered save. So my apologies. But basically, yeah, this is a bit speculative, but I mean, it kind of makes sense, right, as Jason just said. So we'll see, you know, how it actually shapes up and what the, you know, like marketing and press release and actual release date for this feature is. But yeah, I don't know. Usually when you all tear into APKs and find some text in there, there's a reason that text is in there. It's not like us desert just like, you know, just like spitballing things that are going to be good to put in the app. There's they're there for a reason. So we'll have to keep an eye out on that. And for if probably and when it does show up. So there we go. All right. Going to round things out with a little feedback from our amazing fans, listeners, viewers, all of you. Contact that Android faithful dot com is the email address. Anyone can send us an email and leave his question, leave his comment. If you got it like a short, pretty short mini review of something, send us send us some feedback and we'll, you know, possibly read it on the show like I'm about to right now when I pull up the email on the video version. It looks like Owen from Ottawa, Canada wrote in to say I was listening to your most recent episode and your discussion around open Chrome tabs reminded me of how little I clean up my Chrome on Android. I generally keep my tabs. Let's see, I generally keep my tabs on desktop super clean. But my approach on Android is more that in general, my open tabs get cleared when I get a new phone. I've been using my Pixel seven since a couple of months after launch. And as of today, I have 619 tabs open. Not sure if this is a record for the show, but if anyone has more open tabs than that right now, then we should probably seek professional help. Been loving the new show. Keep up the great work, Owen, Ottawa, Canada. There we go. Six hundred and nineteen tabs. I mean, that's I kind of like like that idea. Like just let them roll, let them ride. And then when you put that baby to bed, you know, when you're done with that phone, what is the number? You know, find a place on the wall where you can ride it up there. And then over time, you've got your hall of fame. I mean, I think Google wouldn't want to wouldn't want to wouldn't actually display how many tabs it closed if they didn't want us to celebrate or what's the opposite of celebrate? Be be sorry, be on a horrified stupefied by the tab. So, hey, I agree. Roll it. Just let's just see how see how your phone and your little brain just see how it goes or big brain like whatever size your brain is, my bad. Oh, God, it's been a long day. It's OK. You only have a few emails to read when I do. But I do have I do have one email from Haim from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. So I'm from Crown Heights, Brooklyn here. Does Andrews earthquake detection work after the quake this past week in the tri-state area? I was scrolling through my settings and noticed it. Then I realized I didn't get any notifications from it. So did it work? And Haim, Ron, before he went off off before he took off for the evening, he specifically let left us his own experience with the earthquake detection being a member of the tri-state area. So, yeah, from Ron, this is from Ron. I was sitting at my desk in New York and felt the four point eight magnitude earthquake that was localized in New Jersey. I did not get an earthquake detection notification for that or any of the aftershocks. I scrolled back in my notification history to confirm and nothing at all. I can't do a run impressions. I'm not going to try. Sorry. So Ron says, I guess it doesn't work. So Haim, Ron, I. That's a bummer. That's a bummer. That's too bad data points. I guess if you were in the tri-state area and you did get a notification, please let us know, but not looking so good. What was the magnitude of that earthquake? Four point eight, which it looks like the threshold. I'm just reading on the Google's website talks about it's just threshold is it works for earthquakes and magnitude four point five or greater. So I guess it should have worked, but maybe there was a lot of users who were just in like who like their accelerometer just didn't get enough like shaking data to register as an earthquake. Maybe it was just like really close to that threshold and it just did not register. And as a network, is this the kind of thing that should just work anywhere in the U.S. or is are there like spots? Yeah. Yeah. It says in California, Washington and Oregon, they partner with their shake alert system to distribute their alerts. But outside of those states, they use crowdsourced data from all smartphones with running Android with their accelerometers and vibration data that constantly being collected. Yeah. At the end of the day, these are smartphones. They're not like regulated earthquake detection systems. So, you know, I guess my only word of caution is if you're relying upon this thing to work 100 percent of the time, I think it's understandable that it doesn't because it's just, you know, these are these are like these are like creative ways to detect earthquakes on a device that has nothing to do with detecting earthquakes. It's amazing that they can do it when they when they can. I have experienced earthquakes here in the Bay Area and had it work just as my own kind of experience to share there. So, you know, sometimes it does work and sometimes it doesn't. And I'm sorry. I think the fact that it just it didn't work for this magnitude 4.8 earthquake that the only concern is a lawn chair, a plastic lawn chair falling over should not really concern you that much. But like if it didn't work for a higher like a 7.0, then that would be really concerning. It's like, OK, what the heck is going on here? That should have been unavoidable. Yeah, it's like not to minimize this. But as a dev, I don't know. I mean, I don't even understand. Like if you asked me, hey, when like test, write a test or figure out how to test this, I'd be that. No idea, especially as you said, like in an area where, you know, we don't really expect earthquakes like the East Coast Atlantic. Yeah, I wouldn't have no idea. You kind of just do your best guess. And unfortunately, sometimes real real life is a lot different than your tests that goes for small things and apparently for big things as well. That's not that's not any way to insult the people that work on this. It's just you never know. You never know. So in order to test this, do they have at Google? Do they have a small city that, you know, that they've built with homes and phones and it all sits on like a ground that can shake to certain varied degrees and they shake the homes? I'm just I'm just thinking like, how do you even test this? I mean, obviously, it's not that I'm sure there's some Tom Scott video that goes over how people test earthquakes and they probably use whatever facility was mentioned in that video. Right. Yeah, I don't actually know if it's Tom Scott video on that. But you probably did one knowing, you know, that YouTube. Yeah, but I mean, I think it's off. It's like if it's crowdsourced and it's looking for a threshold, then that is really hard to test because that's when you're getting into like thousands and thousands of users. And you can sort of you could sort of emulate that, but then emulations are not the same as real life. So that's always like the kind of thing with testing is that you kind of test the best you can. But certain things like this crowdsourcing, you know, earthquake detection for a wide area for tens of thousands of people. I mean, if you're in a place like, I don't know that you get earthquakes often, I don't suppose it I suppose there's maybe a way to test it or maybe like as you said, more scientific labs that have much more sophisticated emulations or diagnostics. But that would be a fun challenge. Oh, that would be really good interview question. Not to be a terrible interview question. We do have a comment from on Twitch from Ambassador Domo, who says that they live in New Jersey and that even though the earthquake notifications turned on when they actually go to settings, it says that earthquake notification isn't available or supported in this region. So that's interesting. So the same thing here in the sky, why not? Interesting. Okay. So Google's website says like in other regions, it should like outside of these US states, we use a crowdsourced approach to detect earthquakes. So it kind of sounds like it should be enabled, but maybe it's just not enabled unless there's some unless there's like already like a state provided solution. Yeah. So I'm looking at that too. It says it's it doesn't say the United States in the list of countries where it works. Um, it only says in California, Oregon and Washington. So it must be that in the, it just doesn't work in the US unless you're in those states. Yeah, I wonder if it's because of the less, uh, concentration of Android phones in the US compared to the rest of the world. Good question. I'd be surprised if there's still, if there wasn't enough devices for it to still work. Yeah. Like what is, yeah, what, what would be the, uh, the number that, that would make this effective, you know, that's a, that's another question. Of course. They have any seismologists on the Android faithful. Uh, if there are writing and tell us, which of the positions and how much stupid should, or we, excuse me, super suffer we saying, and how many things are we kind of vaguely right or interesting on, write us and let us know. Contacted. Yes. There's some seismologists out there with his hands. Oh my God. This is embarrassing. Terrible. Get the angry emails next week. Looking forward to it. Okay. We'll read them. We'll, we'll take the, and finally we got an email from Jacob who sent in this, uh, this email and this photo saying, hi, crew. Some time ago you've asked how people watch your show. I do it if I can on my projector and fire stick. So projected in large format on the wall says love the jazz. Love the jazz. Okay. Thank you Jacob for sending in this photo of how you, uh, enjoy the show and it's, you know, maybe we're like life size at that point. Uh, so that's cool. Love to hear it. Uh, thank you everybody for writing for sending us your feedback and your insights, uh, contact at android faithful.com. If you want to participate, thank you to Ben Shown from nine to five Google for being with us tonight. Always a great, uh, time hanging out with you, Ben. Appreciate it. Yeah, it was great hanging out with you guys. Yeah. What do you want to leave people with? Where should, uh, what should people look forward to from you another 20 articles every single day? Cause you are a busy guy. Well, yeah, you can see me on nine and five Google.com. I'm also on Twitter and threads and everything else at nexus, Ben. Um, and hopefully I'll be on our podcast soon. We just relaunched it recently, uh, pixel is our new podcast. Um, you can see after and Damien on that. Yeah, right on. Excellent. I'll have to check that out. Um, cool. Well, congrats on the, uh, the podcast launch and thanks for being here tonight. And, uh, yeah, it's good to see you. Uh, Michelle, I honestly thought you were, you, you were a tired guy. You were going to, you were going to bounce earlier, but you decided to stay with us for the full show and we were very happy to have you for the full show. So that's awesome. What do you want to leave people with? Yeah, I'm barely hanging in there. And if you want to, uh, catch my work when I'm more well rested, you can follow me on Twitter slash X threads masted on Reddit, et cetera at Michelle Ramon. And, um, you know, I'll be posting a lot more about Andrew 15, especially as we enter the beta period, which should be happening sometime this month. Um, I have a lot of things in the pipeline ready to go and still need to be drafted and still need to be discovered because there's still so much left to talk about when it comes to new Android OS releases. So if you want to support my work and go to patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon, join my district community where I tease some of the things that I'm working on and also just chat for a lot of people. Like there's various things we talk about all the time because I just don't have time to write articles and chat with everyone who comments on the posts that I make and also like share my thoughts on various things going on in the Android world. So, uh, join the community and also support Android faithful too, because that also ends up supporting me because I love doing the show and I would love to see it continue for as long as we can. Absolutely. And we shall, Michelle, thank you, Michelle. Great to see you and, uh, get some sleep after we, uh, disconnect here tonight. Same to you when, because I know you're super tired on three hours of sleep. What do you want to leave people with? I want people to know that I completely mispronounced Ben's name when I introduced him on the show and I am so sorry, Ben. I should have just made sure before I open my mouth. So I just want people to know that, that I am very fallible and I'm so sorry. Ben shown the might, did I get it right that time? Yes, you are good. I don't think anyone has ever got it right on the first try. So you're very kind. So that's what I want people to know. I'm very fallible, but I'm going to get Ben shown his name right this time in every subsequent time. And otherwise you can find me at randomly typing.com where I am an Android developer. I do, do talks occasionally on Android and Colin, you can find my talks, associate video and code there. And I am on the internet, but mostly Instagram at Queen Code Monkey. So tonight I'm really happy to be back. I mean, it's great to have you back when Japanese and there was my chair again. My chair just like to buckle under me. OK, well, I hope your chair stays together for at least the next two minutes. You know, maybe if it's going to buckle, it happens during the outro music. It'll look like I'm just dancing super hard. Yeah, it'll be part of the bit. Well, thank you, Wayne. Good to have you back. As for me, you can just go to yellowgoldstudios.com. And, you know, I've got I've got a couple of things I'm working on right now. Speaking of the S24 Ultra, I've got a review and then I've got a kind of a deeper look into Galaxy A.I. The feature set on the S24 Ultra and now on the S23 and a few other Samsung devices. So that is coming soon. My dog is about to play with the squeaky toy. So apologies for that. But and also I just want to mention real quick, go to my substack, which is it's a free substack with Jason Howell dot substack.com. I'm going to be posting some some pretty cool updates here in the next week or so week and a half. So, you know, go there, subscribe. It's free. It's just kind of like a place where I stream all the information around what I'm doing on a weekly basis. Changes to the business as it were. It's all there. Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening to this episode of Android faithful. We could not do it without all of you and all of your participation. Android faithful.com, of course, is the website that you can go to to subscribe to the podcast. And then, of course, like we've mentioned a few times, patreon.com slash Android faithful. If you want to support us directly, you just go there and you become a patron and you get a lot of bonus perks like ad free episodes and the ability to vote on our stories and so much more. We can't thank you enough. Thank you, everybody. And we'll see you next time on Android faithful. Bye. Have a good night. All right, everybody.