Category: Android

Many people know that Xiaomi, Honor, Tecno, or Realme don’t actually make phones themselves. But what if I told you they don’t even develop them? Many budget models are only sold under these brands. Other companies handle the entire development and production process from start to finish. These companies remain unknown to most people, but without them, there would be no “top for your money.” Let’s break down what this means and how it happened.

Google is rolling out a new feature in Google Play Services update 25.14, set to release next week, that automatically reboots smartphones after three days of inactivity (no screen unlock). This functionality, inspired by the GrapheneOS Android platform, aims to enhance security by resetting decrypted user data sections to their original, encrypted state. After a reboot, user data remains encrypted until the owner unlocks the device with a password.

In early October, Microsoft's head of gaming Sarah Bond announced the launch of the Xbox game store for the Android platform in November. However, as of today, the launch has not taken place.

Google is inventing a special mechanism for app developers that will allow disabling APK sideloading for the app. If the feature is enabled for an app, it will refuse installing from any other source besides the Google Play store.

Android 15 is expected to introduce an innovative feature known as the Powered Off Finding API, enabling users to locate Pixel devices even when they are powered down. However, this advanced functionality will comes with hardware requirements available in Pixel 8 and later. Android 15 is expected to release in October alongside the Pixel 9 series.

During the Google for Games Developer Summit, company representatives announced exciting updates coming to the Google Play app store. The PC version of Google Play Games will now feature a collection of PC games alongside popular Android titles such as Lineage2M, Odin: Valhalla Rising, Genshin Impact, and Dragonheir: Silent Gods. These games can be run on Windows computers, expanding the gaming options available to users.

Google is currently testing parallel downloads in the Play Store, allowing users to download two applications simultaneously. Also, by enabling specific flags in version 40.0.13 of Google Play Store on a rooted Android device, you can unlock the parallel downloads for up to 5 apps.

Android users can now set Microsoft Copilot as their default assistant instead of the one from Google. This follows the suit of the ChatGPT app, which was previously spotted as having the same capabilities.
But it is still a work in progress, so Microsoft is testing the new option among Copilot Beta users.

Google has introduced a new optical character recognition (OCR) tool in Gboard. The new addition is called Scan Text for Android. The user can add its button to the keyboard's toolbar for faster access.

Microsoft has introduced a new version of SwiftKey for Android, where Bing Chat was renamed Copilot and also included GPT-4 Turbo.